She Who Hung by Mouth

From: Fangs 3817 of the Tumbling Viper

• Segment 1: The Hunger That Falls Like a Gull

There was falling first, or there was hunger first; she could never afterwards decide which. Perhaps they had been born together, twins in the dark, one holding the other’s heel. There was no up, or there had been an up and she had lost it the way one loses a glove, without noticing, somewhere between one moment and the next. Then the wind, which was not wind, began to sing past her. There was a sound like canvas snapping in a gale, and then the sound was gone, and she was falling, and she was so very hungry.

Hungry like the gull is hungry, she thought, though she did not yet know what a gull was, or whether she had ever seen one. The word came to her anyway, white and screaming, and with it a picture of a bird hanging on the air above a harbor with its eyes fixed on the water. It wanted and wanted, and its whole body was nothing but wanting held still by the wind. So it was with her. She was a wanting held up by nothing, and the nothing was letting go.

And below, so far below that the distance felt like a sound, a long low note that would not end, there was a world.

It was round; she understood this at once, the way one understands a face. It hung against the dark beside something enormous, a great banded sphere of cream and rust and storm-violet. It filled half the sky and moved, it seemed to her, with the slow, dreaming indifference of a sleeping animal turning over in the straw. VaporSphere. The name rose in her from nowhere, as names do in dreams, and she let it be true. Beyond it, small and fierce and white-gold, burned a star whose heat she felt on the side of herself that faced it, as one feels a hearth on one cheek in a cold room. Helios. That name too came uninvited and was welcome.

The world turned beneath her: blue, so much blue, a blue with white seams in it. The seams were currents, she knew without knowing, all running one way, east to west, as if the whole ocean were a single animal combing its fur. There was land in pieces, scattered islands, dozens upon dozens of them, green and brown and gray. One was rushing up toward her now, swelling as a drop of water swells on the end of a branch before it falls; only she was the drop, and the island was the branch, and nothing was holding her.

Lapita. Did she know that, or did the island tell her? It didn’t matter. Lapita, the place where the boats lie down. Or the place of many aunts; why did she think that? Why did that make her want to laugh, here, in all this falling?

Mountains. First there were mountains, sharp gray teeth with snow on the tips like the froth on milk. She thought of milk, and of a cup, and of a hand holding the cup. Whose hand had it been, with chalk on the palms? Gone, the hand was gone. Then the mountains softened and spread and became hills, the way a stern face softens when it remembers something pleasant, and the hills were green and furred and folded over one another like the blankets of an unmade bed. Then the hills became trees. They did not become them quickly; first they were a green blur, and then they were a texture, and then, terribly and wonderfully, they were trees, each one separate, each one itself, with its own crown and shadow, and she could have counted them if she had been falling more slowly. Then the trees thinned and became roofs.

Roofs! Red roofs, gray slate roofs, roofs patched with tar and moss, roofs crowded together down to the very lip of the sea as if the city had been poured from a jug and had run downhill until the water stopped it. Chimneys leaked thin threads of steam that bent all together in the same breeze. The streets wound and coiled back on themselves like the shell of a sea snail. Along the water’s edge stood long wooden wharves and the masts of ships, a whole forest of masts, bare and tall and swaying, swaying, swaying. The lines and rigging strung between them looked from this height like the strings of some vast instrument that no one had yet learned to play.

Saltcoil. The city of salt that coils.

And the masts swayed, and something in her swayed with them; something very old and very far away leaned toward them as a plant leans toward a window. She did not understand it, and there was no time to understand it, for the hunger was growing.

How to describe it, the hunger? Afterwards she would try, lying awake in the long eleven hours of a Saṃsāra night, and fail every time. It was not the hunger of an empty belly, for she had no belly. It was not the hunger of a lover, though it was nearer to that. It was more like the pull a cliff exerts on someone standing at its edge, that dizzy, sweet, appalling pull that says jump, you were made for this, come down. It was the falling and the wanting become one thing, so that she could no longer tell whether she was dropping toward the world or the world was reaching up and drawing her in, hand over hand, like a rope hauled in by a sailor in a hurry.

It was vertigo, and it was appetite, and it was delicious and terrible, and she gave herself to it entirely.

She had no eyes now. She noticed this with a small shock, and the shock surprised her, for surely, she thought, I must have had eyes once. There had been eyes that had looked up into a striped dome of canvas, red and white, red and white, with the light coming through the seams. But they were gone, and still she saw. Or rather she sensed, the way a blind hand feels the warmth of a candle, and what she sensed was life.

The whole world was full of it. From high up it had all been a haze of pale yellow: the forests breathing, the sea grass waving, the little green things growing in the cracks of every stone and the swirling clouds of tiny creatures in the shallows. Yellow like pollen, like old lamplight, everywhere, soft and endless. Closer, the yellow broke apart into pinks, the warm pink of small living things: birds, crabs, rats in the warehouses, beetles under the bark, fish turning in the harbor like thrown coins. Pink and pink and pink, a whole city of pinks. She thought, with a tenderness that astonished her, how small they are, how busy.

And then, closer still, falling faster now, the roofs rushing up and the masts like spears, she saw the purple.

It was a deep, rich, glowing purple like the last band of light in an evening sky just before the stars arrive. It shone among the pinks the way jewels shine in a heap of beach glass, and it belonged to the people of Saltcoil. She saw them in the streets and on the wharves, at windows and in doorways, walking and sitting and carrying and arguing, hundreds and thousands of them. Beyond the walls of the city, up in the folded hills and down in the dark beneath the reefs, there were other purples, larger and stranger and slower, and those she knew without being told were monsters. Some were coiled. Some were sleeping. One, far out beneath the white-breaking water of the reef, was so vast and so deep and so old that she flinched from it as from a sun. It noticed her. She was almost certain of it. Something enormous turned its attention up toward her for a moment through all that water, and then turned it away again, patient as a stone.

But the purples were not all alike. That was the second thing she understood, and it came with a pang that was half grief and half greed.

Some were full. They glowed doubled, two lights wound together like the strands of a rope, twisted so tight that you could not tell where one began and the other ended. There was the creature, and there was something else inside it, a guest who had come to stay, a soul like hers that had fallen as she was falling and had found its place and made itself at home. Those ones she could not have. She knew this the way one knows not to touch a hot stove. They were taken, and she bent away from them as a moth bends away from a lamp it has already been burned by.

But others, ah, others were empty.

Not empty of life; they glowed purple as brightly as the rest. But the glow was single, unstranded, like a cup set out on a table, clean and waiting, with the light falling into it and nothing yet poured. Empty like a cup that waits. Empty like a stage before the performer steps out. That thought came from somewhere deep inside her and was gone before she could catch it by the tail: the bare boards, the sawdust, the single circle of light, the hush before the drum. The empty ones did not know they were empty. They walked and ate and slept and spoke, and they were whole in themselves; and yet there was room in them, a space as big as a held breath, and the hunger in her saw that room and wanted it so badly that she thought she might break apart.

She was over the harbor now. The masts were so close that she could have touched them if she’d had hands, and she grieved suddenly for hands, for the grip of fingers on rough hemp, for the burn of rope across a palm. Grieved and forgot. The water below was green and gray and full of light, and the wharves smelled, oh, they smelled. Even without a nose she smelled them: salt and tar, fish and wet wood, smoke from the cookfires and steam from the factory vents up the hill. Above all, under everything, there was the smell of wet rope, rope that had been rained on and dried in the sun and rained on again until it carried the whole history of the harbor in its fibers. That smell went through her like a bell.

And it was then, at the bell’s ringing, that she saw the serpent woman.

She lay along the top of the old sea wall at the edge of the farthest wharf, where the stone held the heat of Helios long into the afternoon. She was long, so long that her body ran nearly the length of three tall men laid end to end before her tail curled over the wall’s lip and hung down toward the water. Her scales were green, the green of the sea when the light is in it, darker along the spine and paling to jade where she rested on the warm stone. Her upper body was a woman’s, with two slender arms, one of them folded beneath her head as a pillow. Her face, even in sleep, was proud and narrow and a little stern. A ridge of crest scales ran back from her brow like the folded wing of a fan, and from the edge of her closed mouth showed two long fangs. They curved down pale and smooth over her lower lip, and to the falling soul they looked like two moons that had fallen asleep.

Empty. Her purple glowed single and clear and steady, a cup set out in the sun.

And the hunger said: her.

Why her? There were a hundred empty cups in the city below; why this one, out at the very end of the very last wharf, with her tail hanging over the water like a fishing line? She would ask herself this many times in the years to come, and the answer would change with her mood. On good days it was that the serpent woman lay so near the ships, so near the masts and the singing rigging. On bad days it was blind chance, the way a gull picks one fish out of a whole shoal. On the truest days it was neither. It was simply that the serpent woman, asleep on the warm stone, had turned her face up toward the masts, as if even in her dreams she was looking at the place where the ropes met the sky.

The soul fell toward her as the tide falls toward the shore, all at once and without choosing.

And there was the die.

She felt it before she understood it, a small hard thing tumbling end over end in the space between her and the serpent woman. It had four faces and four points, a little pyramid of fate glinting as it turned. She knew, as one knows the rules of a game one played as a child, that everything depended on how it fell. Even meant yes and the cup would open. Odd meant no and the cup would stay shut. It turned and turned with a sound like a tooth tapping glass, and she held her breath, though she had no breath to hold, and it came down.

Three.

The cup did not open. The serpent woman’s purple, so clear and so near, became for one instant as hard and smooth as a polished stone, and the soul struck it and bounced.

There is no gentle word for it. She bounced like a fish thrown onto the deck of a boat: slap, and up into the bright terrible air, twisting, gasping at a world with nothing in it to breathe. She spun out over the harbor, the masts and the roofs and the water whirling around her. The hunger, which had been huge, became enormous, a hunger like a wound, and she thought, no, oh no, not again. Why again? Had there been a time before when she had fallen and failed?

Something inside her answered, and it was not a memory exactly, more the shape of where a memory had been. It said: the first time you fell, they caught you. There was a net. You were young, and you fell, and the crowd gasped, and then they laughed, kindly, because there was a net. There is no net here.

No net. Far below, on the wharf, a sailor coiling a line stopped and looked up, frowning, and could not have said why. He felt a chill pass over him on a warm afternoon, a feeling like someone walking over his grave. Then he shrugged and went back to his coiling and thought of supper, of fish stew and the girl at the tavern with the gap in her teeth. He did not look up again, and the soul tumbling over his head felt his small pink-and-purple life brush past her like a stranger’s sleeve in a crowd. She wanted it, briefly, desperately, but it was full. He was full. There were two of him wound together, a sailor and a soul from some far, cold world of snow, and he did not even know it. She bent away.

She could not go back to the serpent woman. Not yet. This too she knew without being told: the rule rose out of her the way the names had. One who bounces may try the same cup again, but only after trying another. The world was fair, or wanted to be, or had been made by someone who wanted it to be. You do not get to throw yourself at the same door twice in a row, wailing. You must knock elsewhere first. You must learn what it is to be refused by a stranger before you go back to the one you wanted.

So she turned, spinning, sick with hunger, and looked for another cup.

She found him three wharves inland, under a striped awning of faded blue and white. He was an otter-folk, sleek and brown and broad in the shoulders, sitting cross-legged on an upturned crate and mending a net spread across his knees. His clever black-clawed fingers flew in and out of the knots. He was whistling through his teeth, a tune with no beginning and no end, and every so often he stopped to laugh at something a passing fishwife called to him. She liked him at once. He was warm. His purple was warm and single and empty, and full of a kind of easy good humor, like a kitchen with the fire lit and bread on the table. She thought, I could be happy there. I could mend nets and laugh at fishwives and eat clams on the end of the dock at sunset. It would be a good life, a small round good life.

But even as she thought it, something in her was looking back over its shoulder at the far wall and the long green body and the face turned up to the masts.

The die tumbled again. Tap, tap, glass and tooth.

One.

And this time it was not merely a stone wall. The otter-folk’s soul flinched. Without waking, without knowing, the way a sleeper pulls the blanket over their head at a sound in the night, it drew in and away and said, as clearly as words: no, not you, go away. She was not wanted. She struck that closed and frightened warmth and was flung back from it, slap, up into the air again, the second bounce worse than the first. The otter-folk stopped whistling. He looked down at his net and found that he had tied the same knot twice. He shivered and could not think why, and after a moment he began whistling again, a little louder than before.

Not wanted.

Oh, there is no loneliness like that one. She hung over the harbor, spinning slower now, like a leaf near the end of its fall, and felt it all the way through. To be hungry is one thing; to be hungry and turned away is another, and to be turned away twice, once by chance and once by choice, was a third thing for which there is no name in any language she had ever known. It was like standing in the circle of light on the bare boards with the drum gone quiet, and the crowd not watching. Every face turned away. Coats being buttoned. Chairs scraping. The tent collapsing slowly in the wind with nobody holding the ropes.

Where had that come from? A tent; there had been a tent. She reached for it and it crumbled in her grasp like a dry leaf.

And then, because there was nothing else to do and because the hunger would not let her stop, she turned back toward the sea wall.

The serpent woman was awake.

She had not moved her body. She still lay full length along the warm stone, her tail still hanging over the lip toward the green water, but her head had lifted and her eyes were open. They were gold, gold as a coin held up to the sun, with narrow black pupils, and they were looking up. Not at the soul, which she could not see, but past it, at the masts of the great trade ship moored nearest the wall. They were looking at the very top of the mainmast, where the highest yardarm crossed it and the lines ran out and down in long humming curves. A wind came off the sea and set the whole ship creaking, and the rigging sang, and the serpent woman, still and silent on her wall, watched the rope at the top of the mast swing back and forth, back and forth. There was something in her face then that made the soul ache with recognition.

It was longing, plain and simple. It was the look of someone standing at the bottom of a ladder that they have never been allowed to climb. She who coils at the top, the soul thought, without knowing why, and then: or she who is unkindly tall. Both, perhaps. Both at once.

And the hunger and the falling, which had been two things and then one thing, became something else again. For the first time they were pointed, aimed and drawn like an arrow on a string. It was no longer simply I want. It was I want you. It was you, it has always been you, you are the one who looks up.

She fell.

The die tumbled.

She heard it turning in the dark between them, tap, tap, tap, and she did not hold her breath this time, because she had learned that holding your breath does not help. She simply fell, and let it turn, and thought of nothing at all except gold eyes looking up at a swinging rope.

Four.

The cup opened.

It did not open the way a door opens. It opened like a mouth, and she went in. And here is the part she would never tell anyone, not the troupe she would one day build, nor the harbor master, nor the gnome with his whistles and files, nor even the vast slow voice at the bottom of the sea. When the cup opened she did not drift into it like smoke. She did not settle into it like a guest sitting down in a chair by the fire.

She ate.

She devoured the serpent woman the way a starving creature devours, with haste and without manners and with her whole being, because the hunger did not care about manners and never had. She fell on that single clear purple light and swallowed it. The serpent woman’s own small soul, surprised and drowsy and warm from the sun, cried out once. It was not quite pain and not quite fear. It was more like the startled cry of someone woken by a cold hand on the shoulder, and then, impossibly, it did not fight. It opened further. It turned toward her, the way the gold eyes had turned toward the masts, and said in a voice like scales sliding over warm stone: oh. Oh, it’s you. I wondered when you would come. They say it is an honor. Come in. Come in, then.

And they were wound together, two strands twisted into one rope, pulled so tight that there was no telling where one ended and the other began.

What came first, after that? Everything came at once, as a whole sea comes in when a dam breaks.

The warmth of the stone along the belly: that was the serpent woman’s, and it was hers now. The taste of the air on a forked tongue, salt and tar and fish and smoke and the faint sweet rot of seaweed drying on the rocks, more taste than she had ever imagined air could carry, like drinking a whole kitchen at once. The weight of a body so long that it seemed to go on forever, muscles running in rippling bands from the shoulders to the very tip of the tail. The tail, a tail! She could feel the end of it, dangling over the edge of the wall, cool from the sea spray, and she could curl it. She curled it, and it curled, and a laugh started somewhere deep in her new long chest.

Memories, too, but not hers, or hers now, which was the same thing and not the same thing at all. A clutch of pale leathery eggs in a warm sand nest. A mother with scales gone gray at the edges of the mouth. A sister, older, who had gone away on a ship and never come back. The taste of raw fish eaten in one swallow, whole and cold and wriggling. The sound of her own name spoken by voices that loved her, Velisse, Velisse, a name like a long breath going out. And the masts. Always the masts. Years of lying on this wall at the end of this wharf, looking up at those swaying masts and wanting, without any word for the wanting, to be up there among them where the ropes met the sky.

And her own memories? Where were hers?

She reached for them and found them going out like lamps along a street at the end of a festival, one by one by one. The striped tent: going. The chalk on the hands: going. The rope, the long rope that hung from the very peak of the dome, and the crowd below throwing their voices up like flowers; there was something, something about the rope, about her teeth and the rope, something important. Going. The name she had worn in that other life, whatever it had been; going. Gone. She tried to scream after them, and the scream turned into something else on its way up through her long new throat. It did not come out of her mouth as a scream at all. It came out as breath.

One breath.

She, Velisse, the serpent woman on the sea wall, lifted her head with her new eyes wide and her new tongue flickering. With two lungs that were now one, with two hearts beating as one in a single chest, she gasped.

It was the first breath of a newborn and the last breath of a drowning swimmer and the breath a performer takes at the top of the rope, just before she lets go with her hands. It filled her from the tip of her tongue to the end of her tail. It tasted of salt and tar and wet rope. It went on and on, deeper than any breath has a right to go, as if she were trying to swallow the whole harbor and the masts and the singing rigging and the sky above the masts.

And above her, unknowing, the rope at the top of the mainmast swung back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in the wind.

• Segment 2: Seven Times on This Rock

The Rock

Below Saltcoil and the wharves, below the keels and the anchor chains and the green shallows where the children of the city dive for shells, the reef falls away. It drops by ledge and shelf and broken stair into water so deep that the light gives up. There lies a rock.

It is black, the black of old fire. Long ago, before there were wharves or keels or children, before there was a city of salt that coils or any word for one, this island bled from a wound in the floor of the sea. The molten blood cooled where it ran into the water and hardened into a great black knuckle of stone. Coral has grown upon it since, and sponges and weed, and the slow white lace of things too small to name. But beneath all of it the rock is still black, and still faintly warm, as if it has not quite forgotten that it was once fire.

We are coiled around it.

We say we, and the dry ones, when they hear of it, think it a strange thing for a single creature to say. But we are not a single creature, or not only one. We are every viper who has coiled around this rock in our own skin, and there have been many of us. All are gone, and all are here. When we speak, they speak. When we remember, it is their remembering. It would be a lie to say I, as if we had only just arrived. We have not only just arrived. We have been arriving for a very long time.

So we lie, coiled around the black rock the way a hawser is coiled around a bollard on the wharf above, turn upon turn, nearly ninety feet of us. Our oldest scales are crusted with barnacle and soft coral, so that the small fish of the reef take us for part of the reef and nest in our folds. Our crown is coral too, grown over the iron band of a mast that fell into the sea before the present harbor master was born. On the flat paddle of our tail is lashed a ship’s bell, which rings only beneath the water and never in the air. Around our throat is a ribbon woven from the skins we have shed. We watch, and we wait, and we listen. Above us the whole weight of the harbor moves and creaks and mutters like a great house full of sleepers turning in their beds.

And today, a little while ago, a soul fell.

Of Falling Souls

Consider rain.

From where we lie, rain is a strange phenomenon, much misunderstood by those who live in it. To the dry ones, rain is a thing that falls upon them; they curse it, run from it, put up their hoods and awnings against it. To us it is a thing that falls upon the ceiling of the world. When it rains, the bright silver roof of the sea, which is all the sky we have ever known, becomes pocked and dimpled and alive with a hundred thousand tiny strikes. Each one spreads a little ring of light that widens and vanishes. We have lain beneath rain for whole days, watching the rings bloom and fade, bloom and fade, and thought that this, surely, is how the gods must see the lives of mortals: a brief bright ring, then nothing, and then another.

Souls fall like that.

They fall from somewhere above the sky, from some sea of their own, and they come down upon Saṃsāra. Most of the creatures of the world never notice them at all, as the fish in the shallows do not notice rain. But we notice. We have always noticed. We have been noticing longer than this city has had a name. Perhaps it is because we have died so often that we have grown sensitive to the passage of souls. Perhaps it is because we lie so close to the black rock, which was fire, and fire remembers things. Perhaps it is only that we are old, and the old notice more and do less.

Whatever the cause, we feel them come. Each soul is a ring of light on the silver roof of our attention: a small shock, a faint ripple, a pressure like the moment before a storm. Then it finds its place among the purple lights of the living and is gone, wound into some new body like a strand into a rope. Thousands upon thousands we have felt. Thousands in this one life alone. We do not count them any more. One does not count raindrops.

But we noticed this one.

It came down over the hills and the slate roofs, hungry as a gull. That hunger made it bright, and we turned our attention up to it for a moment, as one turns one’s head at a sudden noise in the night. It looked down at us. We are almost certain of it. Through all that water, through the green and the gray and the deep blue dark, it felt the weight of us looking and flinched away, as if from a sun. We turned our attention back to the rock. It was not our affair. Falling souls are never our affair.

And yet we went on listening.

It bounced. Twice it bounced, as a flat stone skips across the water when a boy throws it. Once it bounced from a cup that would not open, and once from a cup that did not want it. That second refusal we felt as a cold shiver through the water of the inner harbor, an otter-folk somewhere flinching in his sleep. Twice refused, it turned back and fell again, toward the old sea wall at the end of the farthest wharf. The stones of that wall rest their feet in our water. And there, it found a serpent.

A serpent woman, long and green, lying on the warm stone with her tail hanging down toward the sea and her gold eyes turned up toward the masts.

We know her. We have known her since she hatched. She was a small cold wriggling thing on the sand of the lower beach, beside her sister, who later went to sea and did not come back. She has lain on that wall more afternoons than we could count, looking up at the rigging, and we have lain here beneath her, looking up at the hulls. We have sometimes thought, in our long slow way, that we were not so different, she and we. Two serpents, one above and one below, each staring upward at a thing she could not reach.

And now a soul has gone into her, and the two of them are wound together, and she has gasped.

We felt the gasp. It went down through the stone of the wall and into the water and down, down through the ledges of the reef. It reached the black rock and we felt it on our scales, like the first stroke of a bell before a storm. We do not know what it means. We do not, as a rule, wonder what things mean. Wondering is a young creature’s habit, and we have not been young for a very long time.

But we are wondering now.

Of Our Deaths

Seven times we have died upon this rock.

The dry ones find this strange too, that one should die and come back and die again and come back, always as oneself, always as a viper. They come back as many things, when they come back. The souls from the sea above the sky fall into whatever cup will have them. A sailor from a cold world of snow may wake in a lizard’s body, and a queen of some forgotten kingdom in a fishwife’s. But the creatures who were here before the souls began to fall, the monsters as the dry ones call us, do not have that freedom. When we die, we return as we were: smaller, always smaller at the start, but the same in kind. Once a viper, always a viper. There is a justice in it, perhaps, and a cruelty; the two are often the same thing, seen from different sides.

Hear, then, the catalogue of our deaths. It is not a pleasant list. But it is an honest one, and we have found that honest lists, recited slowly, are a comfort in the long dark.

Before the rock, there were other deaths, in other waters, far back in the dim time before there were hulls. We died once as a hatchling, not three days out of the egg, in the beak of a gull that snatched us from a tidepool and swallowed us whole. That is the first death we remember. It was very small and very quick, and we have never forgiven gulls. We died once in a cold current to the south, too far from the warm reefs, slowing and slowing until our heart forgot to beat. We died once of hunger in a year when the fish went away. These deaths we mention only because they happened, and because they taught us that death is not one thing but many things, as the sea is not one water but many waters.

But it is the seven deaths on this rock that we count. This rock is the place we have chosen, life after life, to come home to.

Know first how the coming home is done, for it is not easy. When a monster of Saṃsāra dies and is not given to the limbo of the crowded places, the sea keeps it for a number of years. Then the sea gives it back, a long way from where it died, the number of miles equal to the number of years. Ten years asleep, ten miles away. A hundred years asleep, a hundred miles. We have woken in strange coves and on far reefs whose water tasted wrong. Each time we were small and weak and hungry and remembered nothing at first but the shape of a black rock. Each time we swam home. Sometimes it took us a season, sometimes many years. We swam it with the current when we could, for the water runs west, always west. We swam against it when we must, which costs twice the strength, and a small viper does not have much strength to spend. Once we spent nine years crossing a strait that a fishing boat crosses in a morning.

Always we came back. Always we found the rock. Always we coiled around it again and began, once more, to grow.

The first death on the rock was a net.

We were young in that life, perhaps twenty feet long, which is large for a viper of the open water and very small for what we would become. The village above was only a village then: a few dozen huts, a few boats, a few nets spread on the sand to dry. One morning a net came down over our ledge and closed upon us. We were frightened, and we were young. We bit the fisherman who came down after it, a young man, holding his breath, with a knife in his teeth. He died in the water above our rock, very quickly, and the water around him clouded red. We remember his face. We remember being glad.

His brothers came the next day with harpoons. They were not good with harpoons, but there were many of them, and they were very angry. It took them three days. On the third day they dragged us up onto the sand and cut us open. They took the crystal that had grown in our skull, a small one, the size of a coin. They took our fangs and made them into knives. We know this because, in a later life, we saw one of those knives fall overboard from a fishing boat and come to rest in the sand near our rock, and we knew our own tooth. It is still there. A crab lives under it.

The second death on the rock was fire.

In that life we remembered the brothers and the harpoons, and we were angrier than the brothers had ever been. When we had grown to forty feet, we rose beneath a fishing boat and broke it in half. Four men drowned. Then another boat. Then another. We were the terror of the reef; the dry ones sang songs about us and told their children not to swim past the breakers. We liked the songs. We liked the fear.

Then a party of the doubled ones came. These were dry ones with two lights wound together in each of them, souls from the sea above the sky wearing bodies of Saṃsāra. They carried items that hummed with magic. One of them brought fire down into the water, which should not be possible, and yet the water boiled around us. Another brought lightning, and another a blade that sang. We killed one of them. He vanished into a cloud of sparks and left only a crystal and his things scattered in the sand. The others killed us. It took them less than an hour. They cut us apart on the beach, sold our scales and our crystal, and drank to their success in the tavern above the wharf. We were a little larger in death than in our first life on the rock, but not, we have come to think, any wiser.

The third death on the rock was a war that was not ours.

Two island countries quarreled over something, a trade route or an insult or a marriage; the reasons of dry ones are rarely clear from below. Their ships met in the water above our reef. We lay coiled around the rock and watched hulls burn above us. Their fire made the silver ceiling of the sea glow orange, and broken spars and the bodies of drowned sailors drifted down past us all day. Then, from the shore, the city brought its great machine to bear, an item of group power fed by the strength of many wielders together. It hurled something enormous into the sea to break the enemy fleet. It broke the enemy fleet. It also broke a ledge of the reef, and the ledge fell, and the rock it fell upon was ours, and we were beneath it. We did not even see it coming. One moment we were watching the ships burn. The next there was a great weight, and darkness, and the long patient years of the sea keeping us.

That death taught us something, though it took a long time to understand. It taught us that the dry ones do not always mean us harm. Sometimes they simply do not know we are there. That is a different thing, and in some ways a worse one.

The fourth death on the rock was a storm of magic.

Magic moves across Saṃsāra as weather does, from high places to low. When too much of it gathers in too small a space, it storms. We have lived through many magic storms. Most of them are only strange: the water turns briefly to colors, the fish speak in voices, coral blooms in an hour that should take a hundred years. But in that life a storm came across the reef that was not strange but terrible. The water around the rock grew hot and then hotter, and we did not understand what was happening until it was too late to swim away. We died boiled, like a crab in a pot, coiled around a rock that was, for a little while, fire again.

We bear no grudge against the storm. One cannot hold a grudge against weather. But we confess that whenever the water grows warm and the light begins to flicker, our scales tighten along the whole length of us, and we remember.

The fifth death on the rock was the cold, and something worse than the cold.

Each month, in the week of Darkness, the great banded world that hangs in the sky passes before the face of the star. The light goes out of the sky, and the cold comes down hard and deep, so deep that even the water of the reef grows chill. In most lives we bear it. We slow and sleep a little and wait for the light to come back. But in that life the eclipse came in a hard year, and the water grew colder than we had ever known it. We slowed and slowed until we could barely move, and something came up out of the deep trench beyond the reef. It was older than we were and larger than we were, with a mouth like a cave, and it was hungry in the cold as we were not. We will not describe it. We do not like to. It ate us slowly, and we were too cold to fight.

That was the death that broke something in us, and the thing it broke needed breaking.

For as we were eaten, slowly, in the cold, we thought of the young fisherman with the knife in his teeth. We remembered how glad we had been at the red water, and we understood at last, all at once, what it must have been for him. He came down in the dark after his net, and found a thing larger than himself with a mouth that would not open, and knew he would not see the light again.

The sixth death on the rock was an anchor.

We came back from the cold death changed. We do not know any other way to say it. We swam home small and weak, as always. We grew, as always. But when the hulls passed over us we no longer rose to break them. When the fishermen’s nets came down we slid aside and let them pass. When the boys swam out past the breakers to prove their courage, we stayed low and still and let them go home to their mothers, boasting. We stopped killing the dry ones. We did not stop killing the fish, for even a changed viper must eat. But we stopped killing the people of the land and the sea who build hulls and cast nets and sing songs. It is the hardest thing we have ever done, and we have done it now for four lives and part of a fifth.

It did not save us, of course. Not killing is not the same as not dying. In that sixth life a great merchant ship came into the harbor in the night and dropped its anchor without sounding the depth, as a careless captain will. The anchor came down through the dark water like a falling star, black iron, heavier than a house, and it struck our skull where we lay sleeping on the rock. That was the end of the sixth life. It was not malice. The captain never knew. We have heard since that he was a kind man who brought sweets to his daughters from every port, and we do not hate him. We confess, though, that we dislike anchors.

That death taught us the last of what we needed to learn about hulls, which we will come to.

The seventh death on the rock was age.

In that life nothing killed us at all. We grew and grew, larger than in any life before. We lay coiled around the black rock and watched the hulls pass over, year after year after year. The village above became a town, and the town became a city, and the city began to send up smoke and steam from its chimneys. The fishermen no longer told their children to fear the reef. They told them, instead, that a great old viper lived beneath the harbor and did no harm to anyone, and that one should drop a fish over the side when passing the breakers, for luck. Some of them did. We ate the fish. They were not very good fish, but they were given, and that made them taste better than the ones we caught.

We grew old. Our scales grew dull, and our eyes clouded. One morning, in the week of Blooming, with the smell of flowers drifting down from the hills into the water, we found that we could not lift our head from the rock. We lay there all that day and watched the light move on the silver ceiling of the world. At evening we felt our heart slow and slow and stop, gently, like a boat coming to rest against a soft dock. Above us, in a little skiff, two fishermen who had seen us lying still all day sang an old song for the dead. It was the first time anyone had sung for us. It was a good death. We recommend it.

And this is our eighth life on the rock.

We are larger now than we have ever been. Our crystal is older and deeper, though we would rather no one came looking for it. We have lain here a very long time, longer than the present harbor master has been alive and longer than his father. We have not killed one of the dry ones in all that time, nor will we. When we die again, as we will, we hope it will be age and evening and a song. But we do not count on it. One learns, after seven deaths, not to count on anything but the rock.

Of Hulls

We have spoken of hulls. Let us speak of them properly, for they are, after all, the only part of the dry ones’ world that we have ever truly seen. We have studied them as a scholar studies the faded spines of books in a library he is not permitted to open.

Consider the hull.

Of all the faces the world turns toward us, it is the most deceiving. From above, the dry ones tell us, a ship is a marvel of white sails and painted rails, a bright figurehead with flashing eyes, a crew singing as they haul the lines. From below it is none of those things. From below it is a long dark shape pressed against the silver ceiling, trailing weed like the hair of a drowned woman. It is crusted with barnacles and shell and slime, bored through by small worms and furred with green. It creaks. It groans. It drips. It is not beautiful. We have looked at thousands of them, and not one was beautiful.

Yet each is different, and we have learned to read them as the old fishermen read the clouds.

There are the trade ships, the great deep-bellied hulls of the merchants. They come in heavy and low, so loaded with cargo that their keels nearly scrape the high ledges, and leave high and light with their holds full of salt and enamel and reef-craft. Their bellies are scarred by the reefs of a hundred ports, and their rudders are hung with weed from waters we will never swim. When we look at them we smell other seas. That is the nearest we come to travel.

There are the fishing smacks, small and quick and numerous, whose hulls are patched and patched again. Their owners cannot afford new planks, so the patches overlap one another like the scales on our own back. Some of these boats we have known for generations. They pass from father to daughter and from daughter to grandchild, and each generation adds a patch, so that a hull becomes a sort of family history written in mismatched wood.

There are the warships of the country’s navy, sheathed in copper below the waterline so that the worms cannot bore them and the weeds cannot cling. They are cold and smooth and bright, and they pass over us like a blade drawn through water. We do not like them. We remember the third death.

There are the pleasure barges of the rich, broad and slow, their hulls painted below the waterline in colors no one but us will ever see: blue, gold, eyes on the bow, serpents on the stern. That last made us wonder, once, whether the painter had ever dived down and looked at us. We like the pleasure barges. They do not drop their anchors carelessly, for their captains are paid to be careful.

There are the strange new hulls the gnomes have begun to build. In their bellies are hidden great turning blades that churn the water to foam, driven by something that is not wind and not oar. They are loud. The whole reef shudders when they pass. The fish flee from them, and so, if we are honest, do we.

And then there are the hulls that do not pass over us at all, but come down to us.

These are the wrecks. A ship that sinks does not vanish; it comes down through the water slowly, turning, trailing its lines, spilling its cargo like a broken purse, and lies down at last on the floor of the sea. There it begins to become reef. We have watched it happen. First the fish move in, and then the coral, and then the crabs and the eels and the weed. In a hundred years you could not tell that it had ever been anything but rock. The bell upon our tail came from such a hull. The iron within our coral crown came from the mast of another. They are our only treasures. We do not have many.

But this is the strangest thing about hulls, and the thing we learned from the sixth death and have never been able to forget: they do not know we are here.

They pass over us by the thousand, the trade ships and the smacks and the warships and the barges and the churning gnomish hulls. Each of them carries a whole small world of the dry ones, with their songs and quarrels and loves and the sweets they bring home to their daughters. Not one of those worlds knows that we lie beneath it. We see their bellies, and they do not see our faces. We know their weeds and their rot and the patches on their planks. They know nothing of us. A hull is a door that only opens one way.

Of Killing, and Why We Stopped

A young viper, hearing this, might ask: why stop?

Why give up the killing, when the killing was so satisfying, when the fear of the dry ones tasted so sweet, when the songs they sang about us were so grand? They are only dry ones. They come and go like rain. Why should we not break their little hulls as we please?

We would answer that young viper thus: because we have counted.

We have counted the deaths, as we have just counted them for you. In the lives in which we killed, we died soon and badly and were cut apart on the sand. In the lives in which we did not kill, we died late, by chance or by age, and once with a song. Killing the dry ones does not end the dry ones. They are like the sea itself: you may break a wave, but another comes behind it, and another, and another, and they never stop. Each one you break brings more. The fisherman’s death brought his brothers. The broken boats brought the doubled ones with their fire. Killing begets dying, and dying begets killing, and the two go round and round like two serpents biting each other’s tails. Neither one ever wins, and neither one can ever let go.

So we let go.

We do not say it was virtue. We would not wish you to think us better than we are. At first it was only weariness, the weariness of a creature that has died six times and wishes, very much, to see what it is like to die of old age. It was only later, much later, in the long slow years of the seventh life, that the weariness turned into something else. We do not have a good word for it. Perhaps there is no word for it in the language of vipers. It is something like what we feel when we watch the boys swim out past the breakers and back again, laughing, and know that we could have taken any of them, and did not, and that they will go home and grow old and have children who will swim out past the breakers in their turn. It is something like watching the rings of rain bloom on the silver ceiling and being glad of each one.

We watch the dry ones now, as one watches clouds. We do not need anything from them. We do not want anything from them.

Except one thing.

Of the Sky

There is one thing we have never seen, in all our lives, in all our dyings and returnings, in all the long years of coiling and watching and waiting.

We have never seen the sky from above.

Understand us. We have seen the sky after a fashion. Ours is a viper of the open water, and like all our kind we breathe the air, though we can hold it a very long time. When the night is deep and no hulls pass, we rise up through the dark water to the silver ceiling, and break it, and put our nostrils above it, and breathe. In those moments, with the water streaming from our eyes, we see the stars, blurred and swimming and very near. We see the great banded world hanging in the dark like a lantern no one lit. Then the breath is taken, the lungs are full, and we sink again, and the silver ceiling closes over us, and the sky is gone.

That is not the sky from above. That is the sky from below, through wet eyes, for the space of a single breath.

What we have never seen, and what we think of more and more as we grow older, is what the gulls see. What the dry ones see when they climb to the tops of their masts, or to the roofs of their towers, or to the high ridges of the hills. We have never seen the sea from above, laid out flat and blue and shining with its white seams of current. We have never seen our own reef from above, or the harbor, or the hulls as they truly are from on high, small and bright with their white sails, like seeds floating on a bowl of soup. We have never seen the colors of the hills, which the fishermen say are green and gold and purple in the season of Blooming. We have never seen the sky as anything but a ceiling, a thing that closes over us, a roof on a house we are not permitted to leave.

We cannot climb. We cannot fly. We are too heavy for the land, too long, too slow. If we dragged ourselves up onto the sand we would be cut apart within the hour, as we were in the first life and the second. If somehow we survived, we could not climb a mast or a tower or a hill, having no hands and no feet and a body that the air would crush beneath its own weight. We are made for the deep and the dark. We are made to look up and never to look down.

And so there is in us a homesickness for a place we have never been and never can be.

The dry ones have a word for it, we are told. The fishermen use it when they speak of the lands they remember from their lives before they fell, the worlds they knew and will never see again. They sit on the end of the wharf at evening with their pipes and look out to sea. Some of them weep a little, and when their friends ask why, they say the word. We do not know what the word is. But we know the feeling. We have it now, as we lie coiled around the black rock and look up through the deep water at the silver ceiling, where the light of the afternoon is beginning to turn gold. It is a longing for a home that is not a home, for a height we have never stood upon, for a view we have never seen and can only imagine. We imagine it badly, in pieces, like a story told in a language we do not fully understand.

The ceiling above us shines.

And somewhere above it, on the old sea wall at the end of the farthest wharf, a serpent woman with a new soul in her is lifting her head and blinking her gold eyes. She is looking up at the masts. We know she is. She has always looked up at the masts.

We do not know what she will do. We do not know whether the soul inside her will remember anything, or nothing, or something in between. We do not know whether the gasp we felt through the stones of the wall was the beginning of something or only the end of something else.

But we are old, and we have time, and we have always had time. So we lie here around the black rock, which was once fire and still remembers it, and we wait, and we watch.

And beneath all the watching, deeper than the waiting, there is the thing we have never said to anyone, the thing we have scarcely said to ourselves in eight lives on this rock.

We would give a great deal to see the sky from the top of a mast.

We would give a great deal indeed.

• Segment 3: Click, Count the Ships

At the very end of the farthest wharf in Saltcoil, where the boards stopped and the sea began, there sat every evening an old grandmother who had no teeth.

She had not lost them. That was the first thing anyone learned about her, and usually the first thing she told them, with a little click of her beak to show she was not ashamed of it. She was a shellback, one of the old sea-turtle folk, and the shellbacks have never had teeth at all. Instead she had a beak of pale gray horn, worn smooth at the edges by more years of talking than anyone in the city could count. On her back she carried a shell, high and domed and so old that green moss grew on it in soft patches, like the moss on the north side of a stone. Her skin was the color of olives left too long in the jar and folded into a thousand wrinkles, each, the children said, for a story she had told. Her eyes were milky at the edges and sharp as needles in the middle. Over her shell she wore a shawl of woven kelp, which was always damp and never dripped, and around her left wrist a bracelet of beads, one for every grandchild. It was a very long bracelet. She had wound it around her wrist eleven times, and still the end of it hung down.

Her name was Ussa Tidewhisper, but almost nobody called her that. They called her Grandmother, or the Grandmother, or the Old One at the End of the Wharf. To a great many people in Saltcoil she was quite literally a grandmother, or a great-grandmother, or a grandmother several times over. To everyone else she was a grandmother anyway, because there is a kind of person whom everyone calls Grandmother, and she was that kind.

Every evening, when Helios slid down the sky toward the sea and the light went gold and then orange and then the soft rose of the inside of a shell, she came down to the end of the wharf. She leaned on her crooked staff of driftwood and lowered herself onto the very last piling, which was flat on top and worn into the exact shape of her shell. There she sat and counted the ships home.

Now you must understand that the end of a wharf is not an empty place, though it may look so to those in a hurry. It is crowded with old things, and old things, as everybody knows who has lived long enough, are never quite as silent as they seem.

There were the pilings, for one. Twelve of them stood in a double row at the very end of the farthest wharf, thick trunks of black wood driven deep into the mud of the harbor, holding the boards up out of the water. Once, long ago, they had been trees on the hills above the city. They remembered that very well, and they spoke of it often, in the low creaking voices of wood that has been wet for a very long time.

“I had leaves,” the third piling would say, every evening, to anyone who would listen. “I had leaves, and birds in my branches, and the wind came through me and made a sound like the sea. And now I am in the sea, and the sea makes a sound like nothing at all.”

“You say that every evening,” the fourth piling would answer.

“Because it is true every evening,” the third piling would say, and the fourth piling could not argue with that.

They were covered in moss up to the high-tide line and in barnacles below it. Little crabs lived in the cracks of their bark, and green weed streamed from them in the current like the hair of old men who have forgotten to cut it. They were tired, the pilings, tired in the way only very old wood can be tired. But they were proud too. In all the years they had stood there, they had never once let the wharf fall into the sea.

There were the ropes. There were always ropes at the end of the wharf, for that was where the fishing boats tied up when the tide was right. Thick mooring lines lay coiled around the iron bollards, and thinner lines ran out from them to the bows of the boats. They were old ropes mostly, gray and fuzzy, frayed at the ends, stained with tar and salt and fish. They had been hemp once, growing in tall green rows in some field far inland, and some of them still dreamed of that. But mostly they dreamed of nothing. Mostly they were simply tired.

“Pull,” the ropes would sigh, every time a boat rocked on the swell. “Pull, pull, pull. All day, all night. Pull. And never anywhere to go.”

“You hold,” the grandmother would say to them sometimes, very softly, patting one with her flipper-hand. “That is what you do. You do not go anywhere because you are holding. Holding is not nothing.”

The ropes did not believe her. Ropes rarely believe anything. But they liked to be patted, and they always pulled a little less hard when she was near.

And there was the old shell.

It lived on top of the last piling but one, the piling next to the grandmother’s own. It was a great spiral horn-shell, nearly as long as a child, whorled and ridged and pink inside like a sunset. Long ago, so long that nobody remembered when, someone had found it washed up on the lower beach and carried it to the end of the wharf. They had bored a hole in its tip and fixed it to the top of the piling with iron straps, and there it had stayed ever since. On foggy mornings the harbor boys blew through it to warn the fishing boats away from the rocks, and its voice went out over the water, low and mournful, like a cow that has lost its calf.

Once it had been a house. A creature had lived inside it, a great slow spiraling sea-snail with a soft gray foot and two long eyes on stalks, and the shell had been its whole world and its only coat. The creature had died, as creatures do, and the shell had been left empty. It had lain empty on the beach until the boys found it and carried it away. It remembered its creature very well, better than the pilings remembered their leaves, and it missed it every day. The old shell was the wisest thing at the end of the wharf, because it had been empty for so long and had had nothing to do but listen.

“Every shell is empty in the end,” it would say, in its deep hollow voice that only the very old and the very young could hear. “That is the first thing a shell learns. And the second thing is that something always comes to fill it again, even if it is only the wind.”

The grandmother liked the old shell best of all. They had been neighbors for longer than either of them cared to say.

So there she sat, that evening, late in the month of Lathandus, with Helios sliding down toward the edge of the sea. Across from it, rising up out of the east like a great sleepy moon of cream and rust, came VaporSphere. The pilings creaked, and the ropes sighed, and the old shell hummed faintly in the wind. And the grandmother counted the ships.

“One,” she said, and clicked her beak, and slipped a bead on her bracelet a little way along the string. “Gull’s Daughter. That is Merran’s boat, and Merran’s grandmother’s boat before her. A good boat. She lists to port, but only a little, and only because Merran’s grandmother kept her pipe tobacco in the port locker for fifty years, and the wood remembers the weight.” Click.

The Gull’s Daughter came round the breakwater with her sail half furled and her hull low with the day’s catch, and slid in to the dock beside the third piling. The ropes caught her bow, and Merran, a big freckled lizard-folk woman with a laugh like a dropped bucket, waved her hat at the grandmother and called, “Evening, Grandmother!”

“Evening, child of the gulls,” said the grandmother. Click.

“Two,” she said. “Patch-Upon-Patch. Old Dovric’s boat. Every plank in her has been replaced at least twice, and the gnomes say she is not the same boat at all, but the gnomes are wrong. A boat is not its planks. A boat is the hands that sail her.” Click.

“Three. The Three Aunts. Named for my own aunts, though nobody remembers that but me. They were terrible women, all three of them, and they would have been delighted to have a boat named after them, and terrified to set foot in it.” Click.

“Four. The Salt Herring. Five. The Little Mercy. Six. The Morrow’s Promise, which is late again, the silly thing, and will be late until the day she is not, and then everyone will say, How strange, the Morrow’s Promise is on time.” Click, click, click.

And so it went, as it went every evening. One boat and then another came round the breakwater in the gold and rose light, their sails furling, their crews calling out, the ropes groaning as they took up the weight. The grandmother counted each one and clicked her beak and slid a bead on her bracelet. When the last of the fishing fleet was in, she counted them all again, once, from the beginning, to be sure.

And then, as she did every evening, she counted one more.

“Thirty-one,” she said softly, looking out past the breakwater at the empty sea. “The Bright Morrow.” Click.

There was no ship there. There had not been for twenty years. The Bright Morrow had sailed out of Saltcoil on a summer morning with a crew of eleven and a cargo of salt for the far islands to the east. Among the crew was a young serpent woman with green scales and a quick tongue and gold eyes, who had wanted all her life to go to sea. The Bright Morrow had never come back. Nobody knew why. The sea does not always explain itself.

But the grandmother counted her every evening anyway, because someone had to. A ship that is no longer counted is truly lost, and a ship that is still counted is only late.

“You count her again,” said the old shell.

“I count her again,” said the grandmother.

“She is not coming.”

“Then I am counting her not coming,” said the grandmother. “That is a kind of counting too.” Click.

The old shell did not answer. It had been empty a long time, and it understood about counting things that were not there.

It was just then, as the last gold was going out of the light and the first lamps were being lit in the windows of the city behind them, that the pilings began to creak in a different way.

“Look,” said the third piling. “Look, look. Who is that, coming down the boards?”

“A sailor,” said the fourth piling. “A dockhand. A fish-seller. What does it matter?”

“No,” said the third piling. “Look at how she walks.”

The grandmother turned her old head and looked back along the wharf, toward the city and the lamps and the busy end where the big trade ships were moored.

A serpent woman was coming down the boards toward them. She was long and green, the green of the sea when the light is in it, with a ridge of crest-scales behind her head folded flat. Two long pale fangs curved down over her lip. She was very tall; even with the lower length of her body lying along the boards behind her, her head rose higher than any of the dockhands she passed. She ought to have moved as serpent folk move, the grandmother thought, in long smooth curves, the body flowing after the head like water poured from a jar. It is one of the most graceful things in the world to watch.

But she did not move like that at all.

She moved as if she had forgotten how. She lurched and stopped and lurched again, and her tail dragged behind her instead of flowing, catching on the edges of the boards. Twice, as the grandmother watched, she seemed to try to step, as though her body expected legs and feet and the swing of a knee. Her whole long length jerked and buckled, and she caught herself on a bollard to keep from falling. A pair of dockhands coming the other way stopped and stared, and one of them laughed. She did not seem to hear him. She did not seem to hear anything.

And her eyes. Oh, her eyes.

The grandmother had lived a very long time and had seen a great many eyes. She had seen eyes full of love and eyes full of hate, eyes full of drink and eyes full of grief. She had seen the eyes of the newly born, which are full of nothing yet, and the eyes of the dying, which are full of everything at once. These eyes were gold, gold as a coin held up to the sun, with narrow black pupils. They were wide open, and they were searching. They moved from one thing to another: a crate, a gull, a lamp, a dockhand’s face. They looked at each thing as if it ought to mean something and did not, and moved on, and searched again. They were the eyes of someone who had walked into a room and could not remember why.

“Ah,” said the grandmother, very softly. “Ah, ah.”

She knew that look. Everyone in Saltcoil who had lived long enough knew it. It was the forgetting sickness, the sickness of the new body. It came upon anyone who had been newly filled by a soul falling from the sea above the sky. A soul came down and found its cup and went in, and the two became one, and for a long time afterwards, days, weeks, sometimes whole seasons, the new one did not know itself. The memories of the old life came back slowly, the grandmother had heard, like a miser giving back a borrowed coin. The memories of the body came back too, the way of walking and eating and speaking, but slowly, slowly. In between, the newly filled walked the streets with those wide searching eyes, looking for something they could not name.

She knew the look. But she knew something else, too, something that made her old heart turn over in her chest like a fish on a line.

She knew the serpent woman.

“That is Velisse,” she said aloud.

The name floated up in her mind’s eye as she looked, as names always did. It came pale and plain, like writing on a slate: Velisse, serpentfolk, of Saltcoil. She would have known it anyway. She had known Velisse since before she was born. She had sat on the lower beach on a warm night in the season of Blooming and watched the eggs crack in the sand, one, two, two little green wriggling things, while their mother stood guard with the gray already coming in at the corners of her mouth. She had counted them. Two. The elder had gone to sea on the Bright Morrow and had not come back. The younger had stayed. All her life she had lain on the old sea wall at the end of the next wharf over, on the warm stones, looking up at the masts. She was a quiet one, Velisse, never much for talking. A watcher, like the grandmother herself. A good, gentle, lonely child who had grown into a good, gentle, lonely woman.

And here she was, coming down the boards with that terrible stumbling lurch, and with eyes that did not know anything at all.

“It is Velisse,” the grandmother said again, “and it is not Velisse.”

“How can it be both?” asked the fourth piling, who had always been a literal sort of piling.

“Easily,” said the old shell. “Something has come to fill her.”

The serpent woman came closer. She passed the twelfth piling and the eleventh, and then, near the tenth, she stopped.

She had come to the ropes.

The mooring line of the Salt Herring ran from the iron bollard by the tenth piling out to the boat’s bow, thick and gray and furred with age, dripping where the swell had dipped it. The serpent woman stopped beside it and looked at it with those wide searching eyes. Then, very slowly, as if she were afraid it might bite her, she put out her hand and touched it.

The ropes went quiet.

All of them, all along the end of the wharf, every mooring line and every spring line and every tired gray coil around every bollard, went quiet. In all her years on that piling, the grandmother had never heard the ropes go quiet. They were always sighing, always groaning, always complaining. Pull, pull, pull. But now they did not make a sound.

The serpent woman ran her hand along the rope. She did not hold it as a dockhand holds a rope, carelessly, as a tool. She held it as one holds something one has known for a very long time and has not touched in years: a friend’s hand, an old letter, a child’s shoe kept in a drawer. Her long fingers moved over the fibers, feeling the twist of the strands, the fuzz of the old hemp, the stiff places where the tar had dried. She closed her hand around it and pulled, gently, testing it, the way one tests a rope before trusting it with one’s weight. She bent her long neck down and pressed her face close and breathed it in, tasting the air with her forked tongue. The grandmother saw her whole body shiver, from the crest of her head to the very tip of her dragging tail.

“Oh,” said the serpent woman. Her voice was very soft and very strange, with a long hiss in the middle of it, as if she were not used to the shape of her own mouth. “Oh. I know you. I know you. Don’t I know you?”

The rope did not answer. Ropes cannot answer the living, only the old and the very young. But the grandmother, who was very old, heard what it said all the same, in a voice like the creak of a hull in a long slow swell.

“She holds like one who knows,” whispered the rope of the Salt Herring. “She holds like one who has trusted her life to a rope. Who is she? Where did she learn to hold like that?”

“Not here,” said the old shell. “Somewhere very far away.”

The serpent woman straightened up. She let go of the rope, slowly, reluctantly, the way a child lets go of a parent’s hand on the first morning of school, and she lifted her head and looked up.

She was looking at the masts. Of course she was. The masts of the great trade ships moored along the inner wharves stood up against the darkening sky like a forest in winter, bare and tall and swaying. Their rigging hung between them in long dark curves, humming faintly in the evening wind. The serpent woman stood very still and looked at them, and her lips moved. The grandmother leaned forward on her piling, cupping her ear, and caught a few words. They were not words of Saṃsāra. They were not words of any language the grandmother had ever heard in all her long years on the wharf, and she had heard a great many. They had a lilt to them, a grand rolling music, like the opening of a speech made to a great crowd:

“Ladies and… ladies and gentle… and now, high above you, without a net…”

Then the serpent woman stopped, and frowned. Her searching eyes went wide and wet. She put both hands to her head and pressed, as if she could hold something in that was trying to leak out.

“Gone,” she said. “It’s gone. It was right there. Where does it go?”

Nobody answered her. The dockhands had gone on their way. The fishing crews were busy unloading their catch at the other end of the wharf. Nobody was near enough to hear but the pilings and the ropes and the old shell and the old grandmother on her piling at the very end of the boards.

And it was then, in that moment, that something happened to the grandmother. She would never quite be able to explain it afterwards, not even to herself.

She had lived on the wharves of Saltcoil for longer than anyone could remember. She had seen thousands upon thousands of people come and go: sailors, fishers, merchants, dockhands, travellers, children, the newly filled and the long settled. She had counted their ships and their children and their grandchildren. She had told them stories and listened to their troubles and clicked her beak at their foolishness and patted their hands when they wept. She thought she knew them. She thought, if she was honest, that she knew everyone.

But as she sat there watching the serpent woman with her hands pressed to her head and her wet gold eyes turned up toward the masts, the grandmother understood all at once that she knew nothing at all.

For inside that long green body, behind those searching eyes, there was a whole life. It was not Velisse’s life, which she knew very well, but another life, from another world. Somewhere, under some other sky, a child had been born, and had had a mother and a father, or not, and had grown up in some house or tent or wagon. That child had loved someone, and been loved, or not. She had learned to hold a rope as if her life depended on it, because her life had depended on it. She had stood before a great crowd and heard the words ladies and gentlemen and felt her heart lift into her throat. And then, somewhere, somehow, she had died, and fallen through the dark, and come down here, into Velisse, into Saltcoil, onto these very boards. Every bit of that life was as real and as full and as tangled as the grandmother’s own. All of it was locked inside the stranger like a ship inside a bottle, and the stranger herself could not even see it.

And it was not only her.

The grandmother looked up from the serpent woman and along the wharf, and back toward the city. She saw the lamps coming on in a thousand windows. Behind every window was someone eating supper, or arguing, or singing, or putting a child to bed, or sitting alone and looking at the wall. Every one of them, every single one, carried a life as full and complicated as her own. There was Merran, the big lizard-folk fisherwoman with the laugh like a dropped bucket. There was Old Dovric with his boat of patches. There were the dockhands who had laughed at the stumbling serpent and gone on their way. There was the otter-folk net-mender three wharves over, who that very afternoon, so the fish had told her, had shivered for no reason and tied the same knot twice. There were the sailors from the cold worlds of snow and the queens of forgotten kingdoms who now gutted fish for a living. There were the thousands and thousands of souls who had fallen from the sea above the sky and gone into the cups of Saltcoil and lived and loved and quarreled and wept here, each one a whole world, each one carrying memories of skies she would never see and loves she would never know and deaths she could not imagine.

Every one. Every single one.

She had counted them all her life, and she had never once understood how many there were.

It made her dizzy. It made her old shell feel too heavy on her back, and her bracelet of beads too long, and the wharf too small. She put out a flipper-hand and steadied herself against the old shell beside her, and the old shell hummed low and kind under her touch.

“You see it now,” it said.

“I see it,” whispered the grandmother. “Oh, I see it. So many. So very many. And every one of them is as real as me.”

“Every shell is full of a whole world,” said the old shell, “even when it seems to be empty. That is the third thing a shell learns. It takes the longest.”

The serpent woman turned at last from the masts. She looked down the wharf toward the end, toward the twelve old pilings and the tired ropes and the old shell on its iron straps, and for one moment her searching gold eyes rested on the grandmother. The grandmother looked back at her, and neither of them said anything.

What did the serpent woman see? An old shellback on a piling, mossy and wrinkled and bent, with a beak and a bracelet and a damp kelp shawl. Nothing very remarkable. Something she had perhaps seen a hundred times as Velisse, lying on her warm wall, and did not remember now at all.

What did the grandmother see? Two lives looking out of one face. A gentle, lonely child she had watched hatch on the beach, and a stranger from beyond the sky, and both of them frightened and lost and very far from home.

The serpent woman blinked. Then she turned and lurched away along the wharf, back toward the city, her tail dragging and catching on the boards. The grandmother watched her go. She watched her stop by a heap of old nets piled against a warehouse wall, nets too torn to mend that were waiting for someone to carry them away. She watched her look at them a long moment, then crawl clumsily into them and coil up, around and around, the way serpents coil, as if her body had remembered that much on its own. She pulled the old torn net over herself like a blanket, closed her gold eyes, and lay still.

“She will sleep there tonight,” said the third piling. “In the nets. Like a fish.”

“She will sleep there many nights, I think,” said the old shell.

The grandmother said nothing for a long time.

Helios had gone down into the sea. VaporSphere hung huge and pale in the east, laying a broad road of cream-colored light across the water of the harbor. The lamps of the city burned in their windows, a thousand small lives all at once. Far out past the breakwater, the sea moved and breathed in the dark.

At last the grandmother stirred. She reached down to the bucket of scraps she always kept beside her piling and took out a small silver fish, one of the good ones that Merran had tossed her from the Gull’s Daughter. She held it a moment in her flipper-hand. Then she leaned out over the edge of the wharf, out over the dark water at the very end of the boards, and let it drop.

It fell with a small plop and was gone. A moment later, far below, too far for any eye to see, something very large and very old turned its attention up toward the place where the fish had fallen. Then it turned away again, patient as a stone.

The grandmother did not say anything about it. She did not say anything about the serpent woman either, not to Merran, nor to Old Dovric, nor to the harbor master in his salt-crusted office with his arms folded, nor to any of her many grandchildren when she saw them the next morning. She did not tell a single living soul.

But she unwound her long bracelet from her wrist, eleven times around, and found the end of the string. From a pocket in her kelp shawl, where she kept such things, she took a small round bead of pale green sea glass, the green of the sea when the light is in it. She threaded it onto the string beside all the others, and tied the knot tight with her clever old claws, and wound the bracelet back around her wrist, twelve times now.

“She is not your grandchild,” said the fourth piling, who always said things that did not need saying.

“Not yet,” said the grandmother. Click.

The old shell hummed in the wind. The ropes lay quiet on their bollards and did not sigh, not even once, all the rest of that night. The pilings creaked and remembered their leaves. And the grandmother settled back on her worn piling at the very end of the farthest wharf in Saltcoil. She looked out at the dark sea, and back at the bundle of nets against the warehouse wall, and out at the sea again.

“Thirty-one,” she said softly, counting one more time. “The Bright Morrow, which is not here.”

Click.

“And thirty-two,” she said, “which has only just arrived.”

Click.

• Segment 4: The Forgetting Sickness

Everything was new, and everything was old, and she could not tell which was which. That was the trouble. That was the whole of the trouble, she would think afterwards, lying in the nets and listening to the rigging hum. It was not that the world was strange; a strange world can be learned the way one learns a new street, corner by corner, door by door. It was that the world was strange and also not strange, both at once, the way a word becomes strange when you say it over and over until it is only a sound.

Rope. Rope. Rope.

She said it to herself on the first morning, lying in the heap of torn nets against the warehouse wall where she had slept, though she did not remember choosing to sleep there or how she had come to be in them. She said it because there was a rope in front of her face, a gray frayed end trailing from the net. It was a word she knew, a word that came at once, without effort. And yet the moment she said it the word slid away from the thing. The rope was just a rope, a twist of gray fibers, fuzzy and smelling of tar, and the word was just a sound, a soft hiss and a little pop, rope. She could not for the life of her think what one had to do with the other. Who had decided it? Who had looked at this gray twisted thing and said, that shall be called rope? And why did the word sit in her mouth like a stone she had been sucking for years without knowing it?

She lay there in the nets with the morning light coming gray and thin over the roofs. The gulls were screaming, and the smell of fish and smoke and tar and seaweed came in on the wind. She said rope, rope, rope, and wept a little, and did not know why.

That was the first day.

Or was it the first day? She was never sure. The days came and went, and there were so many of them. They were short, the days, shorter than they ought to be. She knew this without knowing how she knew it. The light came up too soon after the dark and went down too soon after the light. Helios climbed out of the sea and crossed the sky and sank again before she had properly got used to it being there, as if someone had taken a long ordinary day and cut a piece off the end. Somewhere in her a small stubborn voice kept insisting that a day should be longer, that there ought to be more hours between waking and sleeping. But when she tried to ask the voice how many hours there ought to be, it fell silent.

She had a body. That was the second thing, after the rope.

She had a body, and it was enormous, and she did not know how to use it.

She would wake in the nets and try to get up, and something in her would reach for the floor with feet. It would try to bend knees and push and stand, as if she were a thing with legs, a thing that stood upright and walked on two soles. There were no feet. There were no knees. There was only this long, long, impossibly long length of herself, green and scaled and heavy, coiled in the nets behind her in loop upon loop like the cable on a winch. When she tried to stand on it, it bucked and twisted and threw her sideways into the warehouse wall, and the gulls on the roof laughed at her.

She learned, slowly. It was like learning to swim in a dream. She watched the eels in the shallows beneath the wharves, the way they moved, the long ripple that began at the head and passed down the whole body to the tail. She lay on the boards in the sun and tried it, and it worked a little, and then a little more. There was a kind of music to it, she found, a rhythm. You did not push. You flowed. You let the body follow the head as water follows the lip of a jug when you tip it. When she got it right, which was not often at first, it was the loveliest feeling in the world, like dancing, like flying, like nothing she had ever felt before.

And yet even that was strange and not strange. For as she flowed along the boards one morning with the ripple running smooth all the way down to her tail, she thought, I have done this before. Not this, not exactly this, but something like it. A body moving through the air in long curves, a body swinging, a body following its own head through space. Then the thought was gone, and she was only a serpent woman on a wharf, and she lost the rhythm and tripped over her own tail and lay there gasping, with the dockhands laughing.

They laughed at her a great deal, those first days, the dockhands and the sailors and the fish-sellers. She did not blame them. She must have looked very foolish, lurching and tripping and stopping in the middle of the busy wharf to stare at a crate or a coil of line or a gull as if she had never seen such a thing in her life. Perhaps she never had. Perhaps she had seen them ten thousand times. That was the trouble.

There was her tongue.

It flickered out of her mouth without asking, forked and quick, and tasted the air. She had not known that air had a taste. She had not known it could taste of so many things at once: salt, tar, fish, rot, smoke, the sweetness of bread from the bakehouse two streets up, the sharp clean bite of the factory steam on the hill, the faint dark warmth of other bodies passing. It was too much at first. It made her head ache and her eyes water. She would stand in the middle of the fish market with her tongue darting in and out, drowning in it, swaying on her long body like a reed in a gale. Then, little by little, she began to sort it out. She began to know the tavern by its taste and the bakehouse by its taste and the bad corner by the drain where the old fish heads were thrown. She began to taste her way through the city as a blind person feels their way along a wall.

And there were her fangs.

She found them on the second morning, or the third. She was running her tongue around the inside of her mouth, as one does when waking, and suddenly there they were: two long smooth curving things, hanging down from the roof of her mouth past her lower lip, sharp at the tips. She touched them with her fingers. They were cool and hard and smooth as the inside of a shell. Something in her cried out at the touch, sharp and sudden, as if she had pressed a bruise. It was not pain. It was more like the cry one gives when one sees a face in a crowd and thinks for a moment that it is someone long dead.

Teeth, said the voice inside her. Teeth and. Teeth and what? Teeth and rope? Teeth and

And it was gone. She sat in the nets with her fingers on her fangs, waiting for it to come back. It did not come back.

Food came. She did not know where from, at first, and later she knew only some of it.

On the first evening, or what she thought of as the first evening, a big freckled woman came by. She was a lizard-folk with a laugh like a dropped bucket, smelling strongly of fish and pipe smoke. She stopped by the nets and looked down at her and said, not unkindly, “You’re Velisse, aren’t you? From the old wall? You don’t look well, love.” She tossed down a fish, a whole silver herring, still wet from the hold. The serpent woman looked at it. Then, without meaning to, without any thought at all, she opened her mouth wider than any mouth ought to open and swallowed it whole, head first, in one long gulp. She felt it go down, cold and slick, all the way down her long throat into the warm dark middle of her. She sat back in the nets horrified, with her hand over her mouth. The freckled woman only laughed and said, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your appetite, at any rate,” and went on her way.

Velisse. The woman had called her Velisse.

She said it to herself that night, in the nets, with the lamps of the city burning behind her and the masts of the ships black against the stars. Velisse. Velisse. It was a lovely name, long and soft, like a breath going out, like scales sliding over warm stone. It was hers. She knew it was hers. It sat in her as the word rope sat in her, worn smooth by use. But when she said it, she did not feel it. It was like putting on someone else’s coat: it fit, more or less, it was warm, it smelled of someone, but not of her. Not quite her. Velisse, the name of a serpent woman who had lain on the old sea wall looking up at the masts. Who was that? Who had she been? And who was this, lying in the torn nets under the warehouse wall, saying the name and not knowing whose it was?

She did not know. She did not know.

Other food came. A tavern girl with a gap between her front teeth, a cheerful, harried, hurrying girl, brought a bowl of fish stew out the back door of the tavern one night. She set it down by the nets. “There,” she said. “There you go. Cook says you’re one of the new ones. Poor thing. My cousin was new once, didn’t know her own mother for a month. Eat up.” And she hurried away again, thinking of the sailor at the corner table who kept looking at her, and of whether she had remembered to bank the kitchen fire, and of her cousin. Her cousin had come back to herself in the end, one morning at breakfast, all at once, and burst into tears over a boiled egg, and never would say why. The serpent woman drank the stew from the bowl, since she did not seem to have the knack of a spoon. It was hot and salty and good. She thought of the gap-toothed girl, and of her cousin weeping over an egg, and wondered what it was the cousin had remembered.

And every morning, every single morning, there was a fish.

It was always the same: a small fish, one of the good silver ones, wrapped neatly in a strip of damp green kelp and laid just at the edge of the nets where she slept, so that it was the first thing she saw when she woke. She never saw who left it. She lay awake one whole night trying to catch them, and fell asleep just before Helios rose, and when she woke the fish was there. She asked the gulls, and they laughed at her. She asked the dockhands, and they shrugged. She thought, once or twice, of the old turtle woman who sat every evening at the very end of the farthest wharf on the last piling, counting the boats home and clicking her beak. Once she thought the old woman had looked at her. But the old woman never came near the nets, and never said a word, and smelled, when the wind came off the end of the wharf, of kelp and brine and something deeper and older, like the bottom of the sea.

She ate the fish. She ate whatever she was given, and was grateful, though she did not know how to say so. Whenever she tried to thank someone, the words came out tangled and hissing and strange. She was not used to the shape of her mouth, and the fangs got in the way of the softer sounds.

And all the while, underneath everything, something was pulling at her.

It was very faint at first. It was so faint that she did not notice it among all the other strangeness: the body and the tongue and the fangs and the short days and the name that did not fit. It was like the pull of a current far out from the shore, too gentle to feel until you look up and find that the beach is farther away than it was. It pulled at her when she smelled wet rope. It pulled at her in the evenings, when the wind came in off the sea and set all the ships in the harbor creaking against their moorings and all the rigging humming. Thousands of lines and stays and shrouds sang together in the wind like the strings of some enormous instrument. That sound went into her and down into her long body and touched something buried there, as a hand in the dark touches the edge of a box.

She would lie in the nets at night and listen to it. The hum, rising and falling with the wind. The creak of the hulls. The slap of loose lines against the masts, ting, ting, ting, like someone tapping a glass. She would lie there with her gold eyes open in the dark, and the pull would come. She would think: I know this, I know this sound. But the moment she reached for it, the moment she turned her whole mind toward it and tried to take hold, it slipped away, like a fish slipping from wet hands.

Fragments came. That was the worst of it, and the best. They came without warning, in the middle of the day or the dead of night, while she was swallowing a fish or tripping over her tail or staring at a gull. They came in pieces, small and bright and sharp, like bits of colored glass flung up out of the dark.

The smell of burning sugar, sweet and brown and sickly, and pink clouds of something spun on a stick. That one came on a morning when the bakehouse was making honey cakes, and it was so strong that she stopped dead in the street with her tongue out. A carter behind her shouted at her to move. When she turned to look for the pink clouds there was only the bakehouse, and the carter, and the honey cakes, and nothing pink at all.

A cloth of red and white stripes, very high up, with light coming through the seams. That one came when the sun came through a ship’s patched sail on the inner wharf, and the patches were red and the sail was white. She looked at it until her eyes watered. Then the ship turned in the wind, the light changed, and it was only a sail.

Chalk. White dust on the palms of hands, rubbed in, a dry clean feeling, and someone saying, Ready? Are you ready? That one came when she put her hand flat on a whitewashed wall and took it away and saw the white on her palm. She stood there a long time staring at her hand. She tried to answer the voice, yes, yes, I’m ready, but there was no one there.

A drum, beating faster and faster, and then stopping all at once, and the silence afterwards, the great held silence of a thousand people not breathing. That one came at night, in the middle of a dream. She woke with her heart hammering and her body rigid in the nets, every scale tight. She lay waiting for the drum to start again, and the silence went on and on, and it was only the night, and the harbor, and the gulls asleep on the roof.

And once, only once, a name. Not Velisse. Another name, short and bright, called out across a great space in a voice she loved. It came so suddenly and so clearly that she sat up in the nets and opened her mouth to answer. Then it was gone, utterly gone, as if it had never been. She could not remember a single sound of it, not one letter, not even how many parts it had had. She sat there with her mouth open and her hands out in the dark, reaching. And then she lay down again and coiled herself tight in the nets and wept as she had wept on the first morning, quietly, so as not to wake the gulls.

Gone. It was all gone. Every piece that came went back down into the dark. She was left each time with the shape of where it had been, like the warm hollow in a bed after someone has got up and left the room.

So the days passed, the short strange days. The weeks passed too, though she did not know their names, only that the fishwives spoke of the week of Passion and laughed about it, and the young sailors walked differently and stood closer to the tavern girls. Then a week came when the light went thin.

It began on a morning like any other. But as Helios climbed toward the top of the sky, something began to move across its face. It was the great banded world, the one that hung huge and pale in the sky most nights, the one the fishwives called VaporSphere. It slid slowly, slowly, across the burning white disc, and the light went thin, like soup with too much water added. It went thinner and thinner, gray and pale, like the light inside a shell. The air grew cool. The gulls fell quiet. The serpent woman stood on the wharf in the middle of the day with her tongue flickering and her crest standing up stiff along the back of her head, and was more frightened than she had ever been in her life. She thought the world was ending. She thought the sun was being eaten.

No one else seemed to mind. The dockhands went on unloading the ships. The fishwives went on gutting fish. A boy ran past her with a kite and laughed at her for staring. Only she stood there, frightened half to death, a stranger in a world where even the sun could be swallowed. All the while something in her was whispering, this is wrong, this is wrong, the sun does not do this, the sun has never done this.

That week was very hard. She stayed in the nets a great deal. She did not eat much. The old turtle woman’s fish came every morning anyway, wrapped in its damp kelp, and she ate them because they were there.

But it was in that week, the week of the thin light, that the thing in her began to pull harder.

She did not know why. Perhaps it was the strangeness of the sky. Perhaps it was only that the forgetting sickness, like all sicknesses, had a course to run and was nearing the end of it. But the pull of the rigging grew stronger every evening. The hum of it seemed to get inside her chest and stay there, so that she felt it even in the middle of the day, even when the wind had dropped and the ships were still. She found herself going out of her way to walk past the great trade ships on the inner wharves, the tallest ones, with the tallest masts. She found herself standing at the foot of their gangplanks, looking up. She found herself putting her hand on their mooring lines, feeling the rough twist of the old hemp under her fingers, testing them, pulling, the way you test a rope before you trust it with your weight. Whenever she did, the lines went quiet under her hand. She did not know why that should be either.

And then came the day of the bucket.

It was a little before noon. The great bell in the harbor tower, which rang every hour from Helios up to Helios down, was just beginning to strike. One, it went, and two, the heavy bronze notes rolling out over the water and the roofs and the wharves, three, four, round and leaden and slow, five, six. People in the street looked up as they always did, and then looked down again and went on with their business, seven, eight. The thin light of the eclipse week had begun at last to thicken and warm again, as VaporSphere slid on and away from the face of Helios, nine, ten. The air smelled of salt and tar and the turning tide, eleven. Noon, then. Eleven o’clock in Saltcoil, when Helios stands highest everywhere.

She was on the inner wharf, below the tallest ship in the harbor, a great deep-bellied merchant ship. Its name, painted on the stern in faded gold, she could not read, for she had not yet remembered how to read, or had never known. The wind was coming up off the sea. She could taste it, cold and clean and full of distance. It filled the furled sails and set the whole ship creaking against its moorings. It made the mainmast sway, back and forth, back and forth, against the gray-gold sky.

Beside her on the wharf, on an upturned crate in the warm patch of sun at the corner of the warehouse, an old lizard-folk man was asleep. He was big and freckled like the woman who had given her the first herring, with the same wide jaw, and he snored. Oh, how he snored. Great rattling, rumbling snores, like a cart going over cobbles, his mouth open and his hat tipped over his eyes and his hands folded on his belly. She had seen him there before. He was always there, always asleep, always snoring, in the warm patch of sun at the corner of the warehouse. She did not know who he was.

But the freckled woman knew. The freckled woman came round the corner of the warehouse just then with a bucket of harbor water in her hand. It was cold, green, slopping over the rim, with a bit of weed floating on top. The serpent woman watched her stop and look at the sleeping man and sigh, the long weary sigh of a woman who has asked a man very nicely, a great many times, to come and help her mend the nets.

“Uncle,” the freckled woman said. “Uncle Brek.”

The old man snored.

“Uncle Brek, the nets.”

The old man snored louder.

The freckled woman sighed again. Then she lifted the bucket high over her head with both hands, and turned it over.

Afterwards, a long time afterwards, Velisse would try to explain what happened then, and never could. The words would not go together the right way. It was as though two things had happened at once in two different places, the wharf and the inside of her own head, and they had been the same thing, and she could not separate them.

For at the very moment the water left the bucket, the very moment it came down in a great green glittering sheet over the sleeping uncle’s head, she looked up.

She looked up at the mast.

And the mast was strange.

It was utterly strange, stranger than anything she had seen in all those strange days. It was a tall bare pole of pale wood rising up and up into the sky, with crosspieces near the top and lines running out from it in every direction, long dark curves, humming. It was a thing she had never seen before in her life. She could not imagine what it was for. She could not imagine why anyone would build such a thing, or how it stood up, or what those lines were doing hanging from it in the wind. She stared at it as one stares at the sky over a foreign country, or at a word said so many times that it has stopped meaning anything at all. It was so strange that it frightened her. It made her dizzy. The whole wharf seemed to tilt beneath her, and she put out a hand for the mooring line to keep from falling.

The water came down on the uncle. He let out a roar like a bull walrus and came up off his crate all at once, arms flailing, hat flying, weed in his whiskers, spluttering and shouting.

And the strangeness broke.

It did not fade. It broke, as a wave breaks, all at once, the way the cold water came down over the old man’s head and woke him in a single shocking instant. She stood there on the wharf with her hand on the mooring line and her gold eyes turned up to the swaying mast, and the strange tall pole with its strange humming lines was suddenly the most familiar thing in the world. More familiar than her own name. More familiar than her own hand, her own tail, her own face. Familiar as a mother’s voice, as an old song, as the smell of one’s own bed. She knew it. She knew it. She knew the sway of it and the hum of it and the way the lines went taut and slack with the wind. She knew what it would feel like to be up there, at the top, at the very top, with the whole harbor spread out below, the boats like seeds floating in a bowl of soup, the sailors with their small upturned faces, the wind in her ears. She knew how the rope would feel in her hands, rough and tarred and alive. She knew how it would feel when she let go.

When she let go. She had let go before. She had let go of ropes high above a crowd, high above a great dim space full of breathing faces, with the light coming through a striped roof and the drum beating faster and faster and then stopping and the whole world holding its breath. And she had not fallen. She had not fallen.

I have been up there, she thought. I have been up there. I used to live up there.

It came down on her all at once, like the bucket. It was cold and shocking and drenching. It made her gasp the way the uncle was gasping beside her, and she was gasping too, without knowing it, her mouth open, her fangs bare, her long body rigid on the boards from crest to tail. It was not all of it. She knew even then it was not all of it. There was more, much more, waiting down there in the dark: names, faces, the striped tent, the chalk, the drum, something about teeth, something about her teeth and the rope. It would come; she could feel it coming, the way you feel the second wave gathering behind the first. But this much had come, this much was hers. She held on to it with both hands, as she would have held on to a rope. She did not let it slip away.

I lived in the air. I was a creature of the air. I belonged up there.

“Brekka’s teeth, girl, you’ll have my death!” roared the uncle, wringing out his whiskers.

“Then you’ll be a clean corpse for once,” said the freckled woman. “The nets, Uncle.”

The uncle stamped off after her, still dripping, still grumbling. Neither of them looked at the serpent woman standing at the foot of the gangplank. She was staring up at the mainmast of the great merchant ship with tears running down her face and her mouth open and her hand on the mooring line, so tight that the old rope creaked.

The harbor bell had stopped ringing. The wind blew. The mast swayed, back and forth, back and forth, against the warming sky.

And the serpent woman, who had been Velisse, and was Velisse, and was someone else besides who did not yet have a name, looked up at it and knew it. She knew it at last as one knows home.

• Segment 5: A Ledger Without a Line for Serpents

The harbor office of Saltcoil was not a large office, nor a handsome one, nor, by any honest reckoning, a comfortable one. A man of generous spirit might have called it snug. A man of honest spirit would have called it cramped. A man of no spirit at all, which describes a fair number of the clerks who had worked in it over the years, would have called it nothing, having long since stopped noticing it, as a barnacle stops noticing its rock.

It stood at the landward end of the central wharf, where the boards met the cobbles of Wharf Street. It was a narrow, crooked, two-windowed building of gray stone, so old and so long exposed to the breath of the sea that the salt had crept into every crack of its masonry and bloomed there in white crusts. On damp mornings, which in Saltcoil were most mornings, it seemed to sweat brine like an old sailor after a long night. Its door was painted a blue that had once been bright and was now the color of a bruise in its third day. Above the door hung a signboard, bearing in faded gilt the words OFFICE OF THE HARBOR MASTER, SALTCOIL, LAPITA, and below that, in smaller and fresher paint, as if added later by a man who felt the first words had not been firm enough: FEES PAYABLE ON ARRIVAL. NO EXCEPTIONS.

Inside, it was ledgers.

There was furniture too: a desk, a high stool, a low stool, an iron stove that smoked when the wind was in the east, a row of hooks for coats, a barometer that had been predicting a storm continuously for eleven years, and a small round window that looked out over the harbor. But it was the ledgers one noticed. They rose from floor to ceiling on every wall, on shelves of black wood bowed in the middle by the weight they carried. They were stacked on the floor in teetering columns, piled on the windowsill and on the top of the stove, where they had been scorched, and under the desk, where they had been kicked. There were ledgers bound in leather and ledgers bound in canvas and ledgers bound in what appeared to be the hide of some sea creature no longer found in the waters of Lapita. There were ledgers so old that their spines had crumbled into a brown dust like ground cinnamon, and ledgers so new that their pages still smelled of the binder’s glue.

All of them were dying.

That is to say, they were all slowly and steadily surrendering to the sea air, which got into them as it got into everything in Saltcoil. It swelled their pages, rusted their clasps, faded their ink, and furred their corners with a fine gray-green bloom. A ledger brought into that office new would within a year have begun to curl. Within five years it would have begun to smell. Within twenty it would have reached that condition, familiar to all who have spent time among old books near the sea, in which it could be opened only with great care, and closed only with great difficulty, and read only by someone who already knew what it said.

The harbor master knew what all of them said.

Every arrival and every departure was in them. Every cargo and every manifest, every fee paid and every fee owed, every dispute over mooring rights and every complaint about the smell of the fish market. Every ship’s name and every captain’s name and every name of every sailor who had come into the harbor of Saltcoil and gone out again, for longer than anyone living could remember. They were the memory of the harbor, these ledgers. And Old Dunmoor Saltbeard, who had kept them for forty-seven years, and whose father had kept them before him, was their keeper. He was the last of their old guard, the sentry posted at the door of their slow, damp, inevitable dissolution.

He arrived, as he arrived every morning, a full hour before Helios was up.

The reader who has never met Old Dunmoor Saltbeard must picture a dwarf. Not, it should be said at once, a dwarf of the mountain kind, all forge-soot and pickaxes and deep grumbling songs, though he could grumble with the best of them. He was a dwarf of the sea: one of that hardy, briny, weather-beaten branch of the dwarven family who long ago, for reasons of their own, came down out of the hills to the coasts and stayed there. He stood four and a half feet tall in his boots and was very nearly as broad, with a chest like a rum barrel and arms like coils of anchor cable. His face was the gray-brown of driftwood, and about as soft. His right eye was screwed permanently into a squint from a lifetime of peering through a spyglass at distant sails, so that he seemed always to be regarding the world with suspicion. On the whole, he was.

His beard was a monument. It was white as sea foam and reached past his belt, and it was braided into three thick ropes, each fastened at the end with a heavy brass ring. It was crusted with salt as permanently as the walls of his office, so that it crackled faintly when he moved his head. The fishwives said you could have boiled a pot of potatoes in it and not needed to season them. On his head he wore a wide-brimmed hat of black oilskin, which no living person in Saltcoil had ever seen him remove. On his back was a heavy storm coat of dark blue wool with two rows of brass buttons. He polished them every morning before dawn with a cloth kept in his left pocket for no other purpose. Across his chest, from one shoulder to the opposite hip, hung the Chain of Harbor Office: a heavy thing of linked brass and silver bearing at its center a medallion stamped with an anchor, a coil of rope, and the arms of Saltcoil.

He was, in short, a harbor master. You could have told it from the far side of the bay. You could have told it from the far side of the sea.

He unlocked the bruise-blue door with the large iron key he kept on a ring at his belt, and stepped inside, and stood for a moment in the doorway breathing in the smell of the ledgers. It was damp paper and old ink and salt and mildew and the faint ghost of a century’s pipe smoke, and he loved it more than he had ever loved anything in his life except one thing, which we will come to. Then he lit the stove, which smoked, for the wind was in the east. He lit the lamp, which flickered, for the wick wanted trimming. He trimmed the wick. He took off his storm coat and hung it on the third hook from the left, where it had hung every morning for forty-seven years, and the hook had worn a groove in the collar to fit it. He did not take off his hat.

Then he sat down at his desk upon the high stool, took out the polishing cloth, and polished the buttons on his coat as it hung on the hook. He did the left row first, top to bottom, then the right row, top to bottom. When he had finished he put the cloth away in his left pocket, folded his arms across his chest, and looked out of the small round window at the harbor.

The arms are important. We must dwell on them a moment.

Old Dunmoor Saltbeard folded his arms the way other men breathe. He folded them when he was thinking and when he was listening. He folded them when he disapproved, which was often, and when he approved, which was rare. In his approval the folding was slightly looser, a difference visible only to those who had studied him for many years. He folded them when he was asked a question and when he was about to answer one, when he stood on the wharf to watch a ship come in and when he stood on the wharf to watch one go out. It was said in Saltcoil that he had been born with his arms folded. The midwife had needed to unfold them to wash him, and he had refolded them at once and looked at her, from his cradle, with deep and lasting disapproval. This was not true. But it was the kind of thing that ought to be true, and so it was repeated, until it became truer than most things that are.

The folded arms were a wall. That was the secret of them, though he would never have said so, and perhaps had never quite understood it himself. They were a wall between Old Dunmoor and the world. The world was a disordered, careless, dangerous place, and it would go to pieces at any moment if someone did not stand firm against it, with his arms folded, and insist that things be done properly.

So he sat. And Helios rose, out of the sea, like a wet dog, as the grandmothers say. The light came in at the round window, gray and thin, for it was the last day of the week of Dimming in the month of Lathandus, and the great banded VaporSphere was still sliding across the face of the star. Old Dunmoor unfolded his arms just long enough to open the first ledger of the day.

There were three ledgers of the day, always the same three, kept on the desk before him in a neat row like soldiers on parade.

The first was the Ledger of Arrivals, bound in green canvas, in which was entered the name of every vessel that came into the harbor of Saltcoil, with its captain, its crew, its cargo, its port of origin, and the hour of its arrival. The second was the Ledger of Departures, bound in brown canvas, in which the same was entered for every vessel that left. The third, bound in red leather and twice as thick as the other two together, was the Ledger of Fees. In it was entered every passage fee and every mooring fee and every tax owed on every cargo that came in or went out or merely passed through, and whether it had been paid, and when, and by whom, and in what coin.

He opened the Ledger of Arrivals, dipped his pen, and in his small, square, upright hand wrote the date at the top of a fresh page: 8612a2.6.7. Illusday, the seventh day of the week of Dimming, in the month of Lathandus, in the eight thousand six hundred and twelfth year after people came to Saṃsāra. He blotted it. He looked at it. He nodded once, as a man nods at a thing that is as it should be, and folded his arms again.

At half past five the clerk arrived.

The clerk’s name was Quillimore Drabb, and he was a newt-folk. He was long and pale and damp, with large wet eyes and a soft, apologetic voice that made everything he said sound like a confession. He had been clerk to the harbor master for nineteen years. In all that time he had never once arrived after half past five, nor left before Helios was down, nor been seen to smile. Not, it must be said, because he was unhappy; he was, in his own small damp way, perfectly content. He simply had never found anything in the harbor office that seemed to call for a smile. He had found a great many things that called for a sigh, and he sighed at all of them, regularly and without complaint, as a kettle sighs on a low fire.

“Good morning, Harbor Master,” sighed Quillimore Drabb, hanging his thin coat on the fourth hook from the left.

“Clerk,” said Old Dunmoor, without unfolding his arms.

“The east wind, sir,” sighed Drabb, looking at the smoking stove.

“Harrumph,” said the harbor master, which was his customary remark on the east wind. Drabb took his place on the low stool and opened the Ledger of Fees, and the day began.

It began, as every day in the harbor office began, with callers.

They came all morning, one after another, through the bruise-blue door: the merchants and the captains, the fishwives and the dockhands, the foreigners and the locals. They brought complaints and papers, manifests and money, disputes and questions and, now and then, a small gift of fish or tobacco, which the harbor master always refused and Quillimore Drabb always accepted on his behalf, sighing. The harbor master sat on his high stool with his arms folded and his squinted eye fixed on each of them in turn, and dealt with them all according to the rules.

There was Mister Ambrose Fettle, of Fettle and Fettle, Dealers in Salt and Sundries. He was a round, red, quivering man who looked as if he had been inflated by a bellows and might at any moment go off with a pop. He came, as he came every week, to dispute the tax on his salt.

“Three per centum!” cried Mister Fettle, quivering. “Three per centum, Harbor Master, on salt that is to be sold in this very city! On salt that is the very lifeblood of this very city, the city of salt that coils! It is robbery, sir! It is piracy! It is—”

“It is the law,” said Old Dunmoor.

“But surely, sir, for an old and loyal merchant of this port—”

“Goods to be sold in a city are taxed at three per centum,” said the harbor master. His voice was low and gravelly and rolled like a hull in a long swell. “Goods passing through a city are taxed at one per centum. Your salt, Mister Fettle, is not passing through. Your salt is staying. I know it is staying because I have seen your warehouse, and it is full of salt, and the salt has been there long enough to grow a beard. A salt that grows a beard is a salt that is staying. So you see.”

Mister Fettle did not see, but he paid, quivering, and went away, and Quillimore Drabb sighed and entered it in the Ledger of Fees.

There was the Widow Tansy Pellingworth, a small sharp otter-folk fishwife with a voice like a gull. She came to complain that the mooring line of the Gull’s Daughter had been tied across her own boat’s bow, so that she could not get her boat out without cutting it.

“Merran’s line,” said the Widow Pellingworth, “and Merran’s uncle tied it, I’ll be bound, that great lazy Brek. I saw him with my own eyes, yesterday, tying it all anyhow, and then going off to sleep on his crate like a seal on a rock. Lazy great thing. If I cut it, Harbor Master, Merran will have the law on me. And if I don’t cut it, I’ll lose a day’s fishing. And who’s to pay for that, I ask you? Who’s to pay?”

“No one cuts a mooring line in my harbor,” said the harbor master, “save by my order or in peril of life.” He unfolded his arms just long enough to make a note on a slip of paper, and refolded them. “I will speak to the lizard. He will retie his line. You will have your boat out by noon.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then he will retie it at my order,” said the harbor master, “which is a thing no one in Saltcoil has ever had to hear twice. So you see.”

The Widow Pellingworth did see, and went away much soothed, and Quillimore Drabb sighed.

There was Captain Orrin Vask, of the trading ketch Frostwind, newly in from the islands to the north. He was a tall, gaunt, pale-haired man from some far cold world of snow, now wearing the body of a gray-scaled lizard-folk, and still, after many years, not quite at home in it. He shivered constantly, though the morning was not cold. He paid his passage fees and his mooring fees and the taxes on his cargo of furs and dried fish. Because he was a citizen of a foreign island, he paid them at twice the local rate, as the law required. He paid without complaint, being a man who had seen worse things than taxes. The harbor master entered every coin of it himself, in his small square upright hand, and nodded once, approving, his arms folded slightly looser than usual.

“An honest man,” he said to Drabb, when the captain had gone. “Pays what he owes. Asks no favors. Foreign, but honest.”

“Yes, sir,” sighed Drabb.

And there was, toward the middle of the morning, a young sailor.

He was a cocky, freckle-faced, sunburnt youth from one of the trade ships on the inner wharves, with his cap on the back of his head and a grin that showed most of his teeth. He came in sideways through the bruise-blue door and leaned on the desk, grinning, and asked whether it was true that there was a prize to be had for anyone who could climb to the top of the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt and touch the truck. He meant the round wooden cap at the very peak, a hundred and forty feet above the deck. The boys on his ship had bet him a silver that he couldn’t do it, he said, and he reckoned he could. But the mate said he had to ask the harbor master first, and so here he was, asking.

The harbor master’s arms, which had been folded, became, if such a thing were possible, more folded.

“No,” he said.

“But sir—”

“No one climbs in my harbor who is not crew about the business of the ship,” said Old Dunmoor. His voice had gone quiet. Those who knew him knew it was a far more dangerous voice than any he raised. “No one climbs for a wager. No one climbs for a prize. No one climbs for a dare, or a lark, or a jest, or to show the boys. That is the rule, and it has been the rule for forty-one years, and it will be the rule as long as I sit on this stool. Go back to your ship, sailor. Tell your mate that the harbor master said no. Tell your friends that the harbor master said no. And if I see you on that mast above the height of the main yard for any purpose but the trimming of a sail, I will have you off it and in the harbor jail before your feet touch the deck. So you see.”

The young sailor’s grin faltered. Then it went out altogether, like a lamp in a draft, and he backed out through the bruise-blue door muttering, and was gone.

Quillimore Drabb did not sigh. He looked at the harbor master with his large wet eyes and said nothing at all. He had been clerk to the harbor master for nineteen years, and he knew better than to sigh at that.

After the young sailor there was a lull.

There is always a lull at the harbor office in the middle of the morning. The ships that came in at dawn have all been entered, and the ships that will go out on the evening tide have not yet begun to ask for their papers. The fishwives have all gone out with the fleet, and the merchants are all in their counting houses, counting. On that morning the lull was longer than most. The thin gray light of the eclipse lay on the harbor like a sheet over furniture in a closed house. The wind was in the east, and the stove smoked, and Quillimore Drabb, having nothing to enter in the Ledger of Fees, took out a small paper parcel of dried shrimp and began, very quietly, to eat them.

And Old Dunmoor Saltbeard, having nothing to enter in the Ledger of Arrivals or the Ledger of Departures, unfolded his arms. He reached down and unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk with a small brass key that he kept, not on the ring at his belt with the others, but on a cord around his neck, under his beard, against his skin. He took out a fourth ledger.

It was small and black and very old. It was bound in leather so worn that the corners had gone soft as cloth, and on its cover, in faded silver, was written a single word: DROWNED.

He opened it.

Quillimore Drabb, chewing his shrimp, looked away. He always looked away when the harbor master opened the black ledger. He did not know what it said; he had never been permitted to read it. But he knew what it was, as everyone in the harbor office knew, and he understood that there are some things a man should be allowed to look at alone.

The black ledger was the harbor master’s own. It was not one of the harbor’s ledgers. It recorded no fees, no cargoes, no arrivals and no departures. It recorded only one thing: the name of every soul who had drowned in the harbor of Saltcoil, or within sight of it, in the forty-seven years since Old Dunmoor had first sat down on the high stool. It recorded the date and the hour and the manner of each death, as far as it was known, in his own small square upright hand. There were a great many names in it. More than you would think. The sea is generous with its gifts, and it takes payment for them, and it is very regular in its accounts.

He turned the pages slowly. He did not need to read them. He knew every name. But he read them anyway, every one, as he did every morning in the lull. It seemed to him, though he would never have said so, that if he did not read them, they would be lost. If no one remembered them, it would be as though they had drowned twice.

Lisset Morrow, fishwife, aged sixty-one. Swept from the end of the farthest wharf in the storm of the week of Darkness, 8568a. Body recovered.

Old Harl the net-mender, aged unknown. Fell between his boat and the dock while drunk, 8573a. Body recovered.

The crew of the trading brig Saltbird, eleven souls. Lost on the reef in fog, 8579a. Three bodies recovered. Eight not.

The crew of the Bright Morrow, eleven souls, including a serpent woman of Saltcoil, sister to the one called Velisse. Departed for the eastern islands in the week of Warming, 8592a. Not returned. Presumed lost. No bodies.

He paused at that one. He always paused at that one. He remembered the morning she sailed, the young serpent woman with the quick tongue and the gold eyes, laughing at the rail. And he remembered her younger sister lying on the old sea wall at the end of the next wharf, watching the ship go out, and watching, and watching, long after the sails had gone over the edge of the sea. He remembered entering the departure himself, in the brown ledger, in his small square upright hand. He remembered entering, a year later, in the black ledger, the words Not returned.

He turned the page.

And then, near the front of the book, he came to the first name.

Not the first in time; the black ledger did not go in order of time, for he had begun it only after this name was already written, and had gone back and filled in the others from memory. But first in place, on the very first page, alone. The ink there was darker than the rest, and the hand less steady, as though the man who wrote it had been younger, and the pen had shaken.

Tamlin Gorse, apprentice to the ropewalk, not yet come to his magic. Fell from the main truck of the merchant ship Fair Exchange during the climbing contest at the Festival of Ropes, 8571a. Struck the water between the hull and the dock. Body recovered after two days.

Below it, in the same young unsteady hand, there was something else. It was not part of the record, only a single line, written very small, as if the writer had not wanted anyone else to see it:

It was my festival. I gave the permission. I let them climb.

He sat and looked at it for a long time.

He had been thirty-six that year, and deputy to his father, and full of new notions. The Festival of Ropes had been his notion: a day of games and contests on the wharves to honor the ropewalk and the riggers and all the trades of the harbor, with a prize of a gold piece for whoever could climb highest on the masts. His father had not liked it. His father had folded his arms and said it was a foolish thing and would end badly. But his father was old and tired, and Dunmoor was young and sure of himself, and in the end his father had unfolded his arms and said, very well, but on your head be it.

It had been on his head.

The boy had been thirteen. He was a thin, quick, laughing thing with ropewalk calluses on his palms and no fear of heights at all, because he had never fallen. He had climbed higher than anyone. He had touched the main truck of the Fair Exchange, a hundred and thirty feet above the deck, and turned to wave at the crowd. He had lost his grip, or his footing, or simply his luck, and fallen. He had not struck the deck, which might have been kinder. He had struck the water in the narrow black gap between the ship’s hull and the dock, where the swell rose and fell and the great hull ground against the pilings. No one could reach him. They had tried. Dunmoor himself had tried. He had gone into the water in his clothes, with his hat on, and dived and dived in that terrible narrow dark until they pulled him out by the beard. They had found the boy two days later, under the wharf.

Not yet come to his magic.

That was the line he could never read without his chest going tight and his breath going short. A child without magic is the most precious thing in all the cultures of Saṃsāra. To harm one is the most terrible of crimes. To let one die, when one might have prevented it, is very nearly the same, the grandmothers say. And he had let one die. Not with his hands. With his permission, with his notions, with a festival and a gold piece and a moment’s unfolding of the arms.

His father had died the next year. Dunmoor had sat down on the high stool. The first thing he had done, the very first, was to make the rule. No one climbs in my harbor who is not crew about the business of the ship. No one climbs for a wager. No one climbs for a prize. No one climbs for a dare, or a lark, or a jest, or to show the boys. He had made it, and he had kept it, for forty-one years. He had folded his arms, and he had never unfolded them again, not once, not for anyone, not for any reason. He knew what came of unfolding them.

The world was a disordered, careless, dangerous place. It would go to pieces at any moment if someone did not stand firm against it. And when it went to pieces, it was not the careful who paid. It was the children, and the drunk net-menders, and the old fishwives, and the laughing boys with ropewalk calluses on their palms. Rules were not cruelty. Rules were not pride. Rules were the only thing that stood between the people of Saltcoil and the black water between the hull and the dock. If the rules ever slipped, even once, even a little, even for the best of reasons, someone would die. Someone would always die. And it would be written in the black ledger in his own small square upright hand, and it would be on his head.

That was what the arms were for. That was what the rules were for. That was what the fees and the manifests and the ledgers and the arrivals and the departures were for. They were the wall. They were all one wall, and he was the mason, and he had been building it for forty-one years, brick by brick, and he would go on building it until the day the sea took him too.

He closed the black ledger. He locked it in the drawer. He hung the little brass key back on its cord under his beard, against his skin. He folded his arms and looked out of the small round window at the harbor, and his squinted eye was wet. Quillimore Drabb, eating his shrimp, did not look at him and did not sigh.

The bell in the harbor tower began to strike.

One, it went, the heavy bronze note rolling out over the water and the roofs, and two, and three. The thin gray eclipse light was thickening at last toward gold as the great banded world slid on and away from the face of Helios. Four, five, six. Old Dunmoor sat on his high stool with his arms folded and counted the strokes, as he always did. Seven, eight, nine. Ten.

Eleven. Noon in Saltcoil, when Helios stands highest everywhere.

And on the eleventh stroke the bruise-blue door flew open so violently that it struck the wall and bounced. A stack of old ledgers by the door toppled over in a slow brown avalanche of crumbling paper. In tumbled a dockhand, all elbows and knees and flapping gray feathers, gasping as if he had run the whole length of the central wharf. That is exactly what he had done.

His name was Tadge Weatherby, and he was a heron-folk, very young and very tall and very thin, with a long neck and a long beak and legs that seemed to have far too many joints in them. Everything he did, he did too quickly and with too much of himself. He fell over things. He knocked things down. He came through doors as if the doors had insulted his mother. He was, in short, the very last person one would wish to see in a room full of crumbling ledgers. The harbor master looked at him and at the avalanche of paper on the floor, and his arms became more folded than they had been all day.

“Dockhand,” said Old Dunmoor.

“Harbor Master!” gasped Tadge Weatherby, flapping. “Harbor Master, sir, you’ve got to come, you’ve got to come and see, sir, there’s, there’s—”

“There is a doorframe,” said the harbor master, “which you have just struck with a door. There are four ledgers of the year 8541a on the floor, which you have just knocked over. There is a clerk eating shrimp, which you have just made him drop. That is what there is, dockhand. What else is there?”

Tadge Weatherby gulped and flapped and tried again.

“It’s on the inner wharf, sir. At the Prosperous Aunt. At the foot of the gangplank. Old Brek’s been drenched; Merran drenched him, she threw a whole bucket, sir, right over his head, you should have heard him roar. But that’s not it, sir, that’s not the thing. The thing is, there’s a serpent woman.”

“A serpent woman,” said the harbor master.

“Yes, sir. A serpent woman, sir. A great tall green one, sir, one of the new ones, the ones with the forgetting sickness. She’s been sleeping in the old nets by Hollin’s warehouse this past fortnight, sir, everyone’s seen her, she can’t walk proper. Falls over her own tail. Swallows herring whole, sir, I seen her do it.” Tadge Weatherby was so overcome by the memory that he had to stop and swallow himself. “But she’s at the foot of the gangplank of the Prosperous Aunt now, sir, and she’s holding on to the mooring line. She’s holding it like this, sir”—he made a fist with his long gray fingers and clutched at the air—“so tight the rope’s creaking. And she’s crying, sir. Tears all down her face. And she’s looking up.”

“Looking up,” said the harbor master. His voice had gone very quiet.

“At the mainmast, sir. At the top of the mainmast. At the truck, sir, the very top. She’s not looking at anything else. Folk are walking past her and calling to her and she don’t even hear them. She’s just standing there, holding the line and looking up at the top of the mast, sir, the way, the way…” Tadge Weatherby groped for the words, flapping. “The way you’d look at something you wanted more than anything in the world, sir. Like a starving man looks at bread. Like a sailor looks at land.”

There was a silence in the harbor office.

Quillimore Drabb had stopped chewing. The stove smoked. The barometer on the wall, which had been predicting a storm continuously for eleven years, went on predicting it. Through the small round window the thin light was turning gold on the water, and far down the harbor, past the central wharf, the great masts of the merchant ships on the inner wharves stood up against the sky like a forest in winter. Tallest of all was the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt, swaying gently, back and forth, back and forth, in the east wind.

Old Dunmoor Saltbeard did not unfold his arms.

But something happened to his face, though only Quillimore Drabb, in nineteen years, would have known how to see it. Something went tight around the squinted eye and the hard brown mouth, beneath the white salt-crusted beard. It was the look of a man who has heard a sound in the night: a footstep on the stair, a creak in the rigging, the first gust of a storm that he has been predicting for forty-one years and hoped never to see.

Someone was looking up at a mast. Someone who could not walk properly, who fell over her own tail, who did not know who she was. A serpent woman, of all the creatures in the world. A creature built for warm stone and the low ground, with no feet and no hands to speak of. A creature that had no more business on a mast than a fish has on a horse. And she was looking up at the main truck of the tallest ship in his harbor the way a starving man looks at bread.

He knew that look. He had seen it before, once, on the face of a thin quick laughing boy with ropewalk calluses on his palms, forty-one years ago, at the Festival of Ropes.

The harbor master rose from his high stool.

He did it slowly, as he did everything. He stepped down onto the floor among the toppled ledgers of 8541a. He took his storm coat from the third hook from the left and put it on, and buttoned it, every brass button, top to bottom. He took his brass spyglass from its place on the shelf beside the window and tucked it under his arm. He settled his black oilskin hat more firmly on his head, though it was already as firm as it could possibly be. Then he went to the desk and opened the green canvas Ledger of Arrivals to the page for the day, 8612a2.6.7. He stood looking at it, with the pen in his hand and the ink drying on the nib.

There was a line for every vessel that came into the harbor of Saltcoil. There was a line for every captain and every crew and every cargo, every hour and every port of origin. There was a line for every fee and every tax and every dispute about mooring rights. There was a line for everything in the harbor of Saltcoil, everything that could come or go or be paid or owed. That was the whole purpose of the ledgers, after all: that there should be a line for everything, so that nothing would ever slip, so that the wall would hold.

There was no line for a serpent woman looking up.

He stood a long while with the pen in his hand. Then, at last, in the narrow margin at the very edge of the page, where there was no column and no heading and no rule, he wrote in his small square upright hand, a little less steady than usual:

Serpent woman. At the Prosperous Aunt. Looking up.

He underlined it twice. He blotted it. He closed the ledger. And he folded his arms over the Chain of Harbor Office, tight, tighter than they had been folded in forty-one years, so tight that the brass buttons creaked, and turned to the door.

“Clerk,” he said, “mind the office.”

“Yes, sir,” said Quillimore Drabb. He did not sigh.

“Dockhand,” said the harbor master. “Show me.”

And Old Dunmoor Saltbeard went out through the bruise-blue door into the gold light of noon with his arms folded against the world and his heart beating hard beneath them. Somewhere far down the harbor a serpent woman was looking up at a mast. In the drawer of his desk, under lock and key, a small black ledger lay waiting, with room in it, as there always was, for one more name.

• Segment 6: Tolerances and Floating Nonsense

Being a True and Exact Account of One Day in the Shop of Tibbet Gearwhistle, Silversmith and Toothwright, of Ropewalk Lane in the City of Saltcoil, Written by Himself, in Which Nothing Magical Occurs

Of My Rising

I rose, as is my custom, at nine minutes before four o’clock in the morning, which is to say one hour, nine minutes, and some seconds before the earliest moment at which Helios may be expected to climb out of the sea. I have found by long experience that a craftsman who rises with Helios has already lost the best hour of the day, and a craftsman who rises after it deserves whatever becomes of him.

I know the time to the minute because I possess a clock. It was given to me by the World Bank upon the opening of my account, in the year 8571a, in preference to the blender or the toaster that I might have chosen instead. The clerks of the World Bank describe these objects as magical, and claim that any person may focus on them to make them perform their functions. I have examined my clock with great care on four hundred and eleven separate occasions. I am satisfied that it is a perfectly ordinary clock of excellent manufacture, driven by a spring and an escapement in the usual way. It glows faintly blue when I wind it only because the brass of its winding key has a peculiar luster. I have written to the World Bank on this point. They have not replied.

My breakfast consisted of one boiled egg, weighing two ounces and seven grains before boiling and two ounces and four grains after, the difference being water lost to steam. I also ate one heel of brown bread, three inches and a half in length, and one cup of black tea, brewed for exactly four minutes. I ate standing, at the workbench, so as not to waste the time it takes to sit down and get up again, which I have measured at eleven seconds in total. Over the course of a year this would amount to more than an hour. A gnome who wastes an hour a year on sitting down will soon find he has wasted a lifetime on it.

I then put on my clogs.

Of My Tools, and Why None of Them Is Magical

I have been told by certain persons, chiefly customers and chiefly those whose opinions I value least, that the tools of my trade are enchanted. This is a slander, and since I expect this account to be read by persons of discernment, I take this opportunity to refute it in detail. I shall describe each item exactly, as I would describe a piece of work brought in for repair, and let the reader judge.

First, the clogs. They are of oak, shod at the toe with iron, and made by my own hand in the year 8580a. The left weighs one pound, nine ounces and three grains; the right one pound, nine ounces and eleven grains. The difference arises from a small repair to the right heel in 8597a. They are heavy, as clogs should be. A gnome should know at all times where the ground is, and the best way to know it is to strike it firmly with every step.

It has been observed that the iron toes of these clogs sometimes glow a dull red when I am at the forge. This is heat. Iron near a forge grows hot. Hot iron glows. I do not see what is remarkable in it. It has also been observed that I cannot be lifted from the ground by any of the floating spells so beloved of the mages. Once, in the year 8603a, a visiting mage’s apprentice attempted, as a jest, to float me up to the ceiling of my own shop. He was a lanky youth from the islands to the north, with a wand of polished bone and a great opinion of himself. His spell slid off me, as he put it afterwards, like water off a duck. This I attribute to the iron. It is a well-known property of iron that it is heavy, and a well-known property of heavy things that they stay down. The apprentice, I may add, then attempted to float my anvil. He succeeded in raising it three-quarters of an inch before dropping it on his own foot. I charged him nothing for the advice I gave him afterwards, which was to go home.

Second, the apron. It is of oxhide, a quarter of an inch thick, reaching from my collarbone to six inches below the knee. It has twenty pockets, which I have sewn on myself over the years, one at a time, as need arose. Each pocket holds exactly one tool and no more, so that I never need search for anything. I simply reach for the pocket in which it lives, and there it is. People say the tools in these pockets come to my hand faster than a hand can move. I say I have used them for forty years, and a hand learns.

The apron does not burn. This, too, has been held against me. In the year 8588a a crucible of molten silver cracked in my hands and poured its contents down the front of me. The silver ran off the leather and onto the floor, where it cooled into a shape resembling a startled hare. I have kept it, and it is on the shelf above the door. The apron was not marked. People who saw it said that this was magic. I say it was very good oxhide, very well cured. I paid two silver and four copper for the hide in 8579a, which was a great deal of money at that time, and it was worth every copper.

Third, the goggles. These are of brass, with two round lenses of ground glass, and a third lens on a hinge that may be swung down before either eye for close work. With this third lens I can see the grain of a piece of silver, the joint of a fine chain, or the scratch left by a forger’s graver in a false maker’s mark, down to the sixty-fourth part of an inch. They glow. I acknowledge it. When I lower the third lens and look closely at a piece of work, the brass rims give off a soft yellowish light. In the same instant I find that I know the exact weight of the piece, its material, how much damage it has taken, and how much more it can bear. Persons of a superstitious turn of mind have suggested a connection between these two events. I reply that the glow is the light of my lamp reflected from the polished brass. The knowledge is simply the result of forty years of looking at silver. A gnome who has looked at silver for forty years does not need to be told what it weighs.

I will grant that the goggles have once or twice set fire to things. When I tilt the third lens a certain way, toward a window with Helios behind it, the light comes through in a thin hot beam, and wood smokes where it falls. But this is only the property of a good lens, which is to gather light. Any child with a bit of curved glass can do the same. I have done it, as a demonstration, for several children. I advised each of them to tell their parents it was perfectly natural. It is.

Fourth, the whistle. It is of tin, four inches and three-eighths long, with six holes, and it hangs from a cord about my neck so that I may put it to my lips without taking my hands from the work. I whistle while I work. Everybody knows this. I do not know that I am doing it, until somebody points it out, usually with irritation.

I will say only this. When I whistle near a piece of machinery, any piece at all, from a ship’s winch to a lady’s music box, I hear where it is out of true. A gear with a chipped tooth makes a sound against my whistle like a sour note in a hymn. So does a spring that has lost its temper, or a pawl that does not quite catch. I find the fault at once and set it right. When I blow a particular note, very shrill, which I keep for the purpose, certain mechanisms loosen and others tighten, and certain locks fall open. I have also noticed that persons chanting spells nearby break off in confusion, which I count a public service. I regard all this as a simple matter of pitch, of the vibration of the air against metal, of tolerances. I have explained it to the Guild of Locksmiths on three occasions, and they have three times asked me to stop doing it in public.

Fifth, the bracer. This is a sleeve of stiff leather, worn on the right forearm from wrist to elbow, with eleven narrow pockets along its length. In them I keep my needle files: round, half-round, flat, square, triangular, knife-edged, and the rest. The finest of them is no thicker than a hair from a gull’s breast. With these I finish the inside of a ring, or the seat of a crystal in its bezel, or the edge of a fang cap where it must sit against a gum without pinching. My hand does not shake when I wear it. It has not shaken in thirty years, not in winter, not in the cold of the week of Darkness, not on the morning after the wedding of my nephew Grenwick, an occasion I do not wish to describe further. Some people find this unusual in a gnome of my age. I attribute it to clean living, black tea, and the support the stiff leather gives the wrist.

It is true that in the year 8601a, at the request of the city watch, I filed through the iron manacle of a prisoner who had been wrongly arrested and whose key had been lost. It took me one minute and four seconds, by my clock. The watch sergeant said no file could cut iron that fast. I told him that was because he had never seen a good file. He has since sent me three other prisoners, all of them, I am assured, wrongly arrested.

These, then, are my tools. Not one of them is enchanted. I put no magic in my work, nor in my tools, nor in anything else. Magic is for people who cannot use a file. I have always said so, and I have never been given reason to say otherwise. And that is the whole of it.

Of Pumice

At four o’clock and some minutes I opened the shutters of the shop. I lit the lamp and the forge, swept the floor, and took down from its shelf the jar of pumice.

Pumice is the most important material in my trade, and the least regarded. It is a stone made from the froth of a volcano, light enough to float on water. Ground fine, it is the best thing in the world for polishing silver, shaping enamel, and taking down a rough edge without scoring the surface. I buy it from a stone-dealer on the hill who gathers it from the slopes of the old fire-mountain behind the city. It comes in lumps the size of a fist. I grind it myself in a stone mortar, to three grades, coarse, middling, and fine, and keep each grade in its own jar.

I had occasion that morning to count the grains in a thimbleful of the fine grade. A customer, of whom more presently, had asked me how fine it was, and I am not a gnome to give an answer I have not checked. The count came to four thousand, three hundred and twelve grains, give or take a dozen that fell on the floor and could not be recovered. I wrote the figure on the jar in chalk. It took me forty-one minutes. I do not regard them as wasted. A craftsman ought to know his materials, and now I know mine better than any gnome in Lapita.

I note here, since I am being exact, that the jar of fine pumice was very nearly empty. The stone-dealer on the hill has raised his price twice in the past year, from four copper the pound to five, and from five to six. He tells me this is because so much of the best pumice is being bought up and shipped away, at great expense, to the gnomish works in the high hills to the north, where the Great Undertaking is in progress. I will return to the Great Undertaking at the end of this account. I mention it here only so that the reader may know that the price of pumice in Saltcoil is now six copper the pound. It was four in 8611a. The difference is the price of pride.

Of My Customers

My first customer arrived at half past five. He was an orc of the docks named Gurrak, a large, mild, soft-spoken person with a cracked left tusk. He had cracked it, he said, opening a crate of salted eels with his teeth, which I told him was a foolish thing to do. He agreed with me. He wanted a band, something to hold the tusk together so the crack would not spread.

I measured the tusk with calipers: two inches and five-eighths at the base, tapering to one inch and three-sixteenths at the band line. The crack ran one inch and a quarter from the tip toward the root. I fitted him with a band of plain silver, three-sixteenths of an inch wide and weighing one-third of an ounce and eleven grains, filed smooth on the inside so as not to rub the gum. The fitting took twenty-two minutes. My bracer glowed faintly through the whole of it, which I attribute to the lamp.

When I had finished, Gurrak looked at himself in my little mirror and turned his head from side to side. He said that the tusk felt better than it had before he cracked it, which was not possible, and that he could feel the band holding it together like a hand, which was fanciful. I charged him two silver. He paid three, and thanked me twice, and went out whistling, which I did not care for, as he whistled flat.

My second customer was a lizard-folk woman of middle years named Sabbet. She wanted a ring made smaller for her daughter, who had come of age and was to be given her grandmother’s ring. I took it down from size eleven to size seven, which is not a small adjustment. I did it in half an hour, by my clock, and charged her one silver. She stood and watched me the whole time, with her tongue flickering in and out, as lizard folk do when they are thinking. When I had finished she said that she had never seen a ring made smaller so fast. I told her that was because she had never watched a good silversmith work. She said, but your goggles were glowing. I said, that is the lamp. She said, but the lamp is behind you. I said, then it is the window. She went away.

My third customer was the one who asked about the pumice. I will not name him, for he did not deserve it. He was a mage’s apprentice, a soft-handed youth in a velvet coat with a wand of black wood at his belt and an expression of great self-satisfaction. He had come down from the city in the clouds, or so he said, on business for his master. He brought me a spoon.

It was a silver spoon, of good weight and handsome pattern, and it was broken. Not bent, not cracked, but broken in the sense he meant. He explained that it had been enchanted to float. It was meant to rise from the table of its own accord when wanted, drift to the hand of whoever wished to stir their tea, and drift back again when the tea was stirred. It no longer floated. It lay on the table like any other spoon. His master was very much put out, he said, and wished to know whether I could mend it.

I examined the spoon through my goggles. It was perfectly sound. There was nothing whatever wrong with it as a spoon. It weighed one ounce, seven pennyweight and two grains, which is exactly what a spoon of that pattern ought to weigh. Its silver was of good quality, ninety-two and a half parts in the hundred. Its bowl was well formed, its handle well balanced, and its finish only slightly worn. It would stir tea admirably, in the ordinary way, if someone would only pick it up.

I told him so.

He said, but it does not float.

I said, a spoon is not meant to float. A spoon is meant to be held. A gnome who cannot pick up his own spoon has no business drinking tea.

He said that the people of the city in the clouds did not care to pick up their own spoons. They regarded it as beneath them. When I asked why, he said it was because they could make the spoons come to them instead.

I said that was the stupidest thing I had heard all year, and it was only the seventh day of the week of Dimming.

He grew red in the face and said that I was a mere metalsmith and did not understand the higher arts. I said that I understood a spoon. He asked how fine my polishing pumice was. I do not know why he asked; I believe he meant it as an insult, implying that my work was coarse. So I counted the grains in a thimbleful, as I have recorded above. It took forty-one minutes. He stood waiting the whole time, growing redder. When I told him the figure, four thousand, three hundred and twelve, he could think of nothing to say, and went away with his spoon.

I did not charge him. I have never taken money from a customer whose problem was that he did not know what a spoon was for.

Of a Noise at Noon

Between the departure of the apprentice and the hour of noon I worked alone. I was setting a series of small crystals into the bezels of a dozen silver buttons, a commission from a ship’s captain who wished to have them on his best coat for his daughter’s wedding. The crystals were of the first tier, each the size and weight of a small coin, and of a pale sea-glass color. I bought them from the crystal-setter in Bell Street at three silver apiece. She tells me they were taken from the bodies of reef eels, which grow them in the backs of their skulls. I weighed each one before setting it. They came to between eighty-one and eighty-seven grains apiece, which is within the ordinary tolerance.

I will say a word here about crystals, because it bears on my reputation.

Crystals are honest things. People speak of them as though they were magic, but they are not. They are batteries, things of storing, like jars. A jar holds water; a crystal holds power. A jar does not care what water is put into it, nor what is done with the water when it is poured out, and neither does a crystal. I set crystals into my work because they are useful, as a jar is useful. I do not put anything into them. If others choose to put magic into the crystals I have set, that is their affair and not mine. And if the crystal in a captain’s button happens to begin glowing when I tap it into its bezel with my small hammer, as did each of the twelve that morning, that is because I have tapped it correctly, and a well-set crystal catches the light. And that is the whole of it.

At eleven o’clock precisely the bell in the harbor tower began to strike noon. On the eleventh stroke I heard from the direction of the inner wharves a great roar, like that of a bull walrus in the mating season, followed by a good deal of shouting. I put down my hammer and went to the door.

I could see nothing of the inner wharves from my door, which faces up Ropewalk Lane and not down it. But a few minutes later I saw the harbor master go by. Old Dunmoor Saltbeard came marching down the lane from the direction of his office at a pace I had never seen him use before. His arms were folded so tightly across his chest that I feared for his buttons, and his black hat was pulled down low over his squinted eye. A long-legged heron-folk dockhand scurried beside him, flapping and talking. They did not look at me. They went on down toward the water and were gone.

I returned to my bench. I learned afterwards from Sabbet’s daughter, who came for the ring that afternoon, what had happened. A fishwife had poured a bucket of harbor water over her sleeping uncle, and a serpent woman had stood weeping at the foot of the gangplank of the Prosperous Aunt and stared up at the mast. Neither event seemed to me to call for the harbor master. I said so. Sabbet’s daughter said the serpent woman had been there for some time, staring up at the main truck as if she wanted to climb it.

I said that a serpent woman had no more business on a mast than a fish had on a horse, and that if she climbed it she would fall off. Sabbet’s daughter said that was what everyone was saying.

I said, then everyone is right, for once. I thought no more about it, then.

Of the City in the Clouds

At a quarter past two in the afternoon, by my clock, a shadow fell across the shop.

It was not the shadow of a cloud, though from below it looked like one. I knew what it was before I went to the window. Everybody in Saltcoil knows that shadow, which comes perhaps three times a year, whenever the wind blows from the right quarter and the descendants of the founders, whoever they may be, choose to steer it over our island. It was the shadow of the city in the clouds.

I did not go out into the street to look at it, though everyone else in Ropewalk Lane did. I heard them go: the doors banging, the children shouting, the old women calling to one another from their windows. I remained at my bench and went on with my work, which was the polishing of a silver chain of eighty-three links for a lady of the hill. But since I wish this account to be exact, I will set down here what is known of the city in the clouds, so that persons who have never seen it may form an accurate opinion of it. I have no doubt that opinion will agree with mine.

The city in the clouds consists of a number of towers, the property of mages. Each tower stands upon six great bowls arranged in a circle, with the tower in the middle like the hub of a wheel. Each bowl has been made to float by means of a spell, which the mage who owns it must cast upon the bowl every single day for a whole year. If he misses a single day, through illness, or forgetfulness, or a festival, or a late night at the tavern, the spell fails and he must begin again from the first day. I am told that the average mage who undertakes this labor fails three times before he succeeds. I am told that some have failed eleven times and abandoned it. I am told that one, a mage of the islands to the south, failed on the three hundred and forty-second day of his first attempt because he had a cold and slept through his alarm. He then hanged himself, or tried to; the rope was enchanted, and floated.

When at last the bowls float, they rise to a height of three thousand feet above the ground and stay there, and the mage builds his tower upon them. He builds it one floor a year, for some reason of the spell that I have never had explained to my satisfaction, and most mages build twenty floors. It therefore takes the average mage twenty-one years, at the least, to build a tower that a competent mason could have put up in one. He must also live on it while it is being built, three thousand feet up, in the cold and the wind, with nothing whatever beneath him. Not stone, not earth, not a good iron chain: nothing at all but a spell, which he must trust absolutely. I regard this as the highest folly of which a thinking creature is capable. It is to build a house on nothing and call it a house.

The bowls, being bowls, catch the rain. The rain collects in them and makes small swamps, three thousand feet up, in which frogs breed and mosquitoes hatch. The mages, I am told, regard the frogs as charming. The mages also like to keep the outsides of their towers clean, being vain. So they summon rainstorms, from time to time, to wash the walls. The rain runs down the towers and into the bowls and makes more swamp. The swamp breathes up mist, and the mist gathers around the bases of the towers into a cloud, so that from below the whole city looks like a passing cloud. The mages regard this as beautiful. I regard it as the natural consequence of putting a swamp in the sky.

Over the centuries the towers have been linked together by cables and bridges, and the avian peoples have come to live among them. They build their nests and houses on the cables, which they find agreeable. A bird folk, after all, does not mind living on nothing; it was born to it. I have no quarrel with the bird folk.

And there is more. I am told, by persons who claim to know, that a mage of the third tier or higher can make a larger and flatter bowl. Beneath such a bowl the pull of the ground is turned upside down, so that buildings may be hung beneath it with their floors toward the bowl and their roofs toward the earth. A person living in such a building, looking up, sees the land and the sea of the world above his head, as if he were standing on the ceiling of a room. I am told this is a great wonder. I am told people weep to see it. I say that a gnome who wishes to see the ground above his head may do so very easily by standing on his head, and save himself a great deal of trouble.

And lastly, and most absurdly of all, the city in the clouds can be steered. Not by the mages; by their children. The bowls are bound to the mage who made them, and when he has children, born before he was filled by his soul, for the filled are sterile, those children can together influence the direction in which the bowls drift. So the city is steered, if one can call it steering, by a committee of the grown children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of dead mages. Being a committee, it never agrees on anything, and the whole city wanders across the sky like a drunk man walking home. Today, apparently, it had wandered over Saltcoil.

I have a proposal on this subject, which I put forward with all modesty, for the consideration of the mages. Let every tower in the city in the clouds be fastened to the ground by a single good iron chain, forged by an honest smith and anchored in honest rock. The city could then be steered to wherever its owners wished, simply by moving the anchor, and no committee would be needed. The bowls could be lowered at need for the convenience of tradesmen. The swamps could be drained by gravity into honest gutters, the frogs restored to the earth where they belong, and the whole enterprise made safe, sensible, and convenient. The towers would of course then cease to float, and become buildings, which is what they ought to have been in the first place. I have sent this proposal to the city in the clouds on three occasions. They have not replied.

So I sat at my bench, polishing the lady’s chain, and did not go out.

I went to the window, however. I did not go out; I went to the window. A man may look out of his own window without being said to have looked. I lowered the third lens of my goggles, as I would for close work, and looked up.

I will set down exactly what I saw, though it is against my interest to do so.

The city in the clouds lay three thousand feet above Saltcoil, drifting slowly from east to west with the upper wind. From below it looked, as I have said, like a cloud: a great white heap of mist, broad and soft, with its edges turned gold where Helios caught them. But through the third lens I could see what was inside the cloud.

I saw towers. There were more than I could count, scores of them, perhaps a hundred: white towers and gray towers and towers of red stone and blue, slender towers and squat towers, towers with spires and towers with domes and one tower in the shape of an enormous coiled shell. They stood in the mist on their great circles of bowls. Between them ran the cables, a thousand fine black lines strung from tower to tower like the rigging of a ship, and on the cables the houses of the bird folk hung like beads on a thread. The bird folk themselves flew among the towers in their hundreds, small bright moving points against the white, wheeling and calling. Their voices came down faintly to me, three thousand feet below, like the sound of a far-off school letting out. Water poured in thin bright threads from the edges of the bowls and broke into spray as it fell, and the spray caught the light and made, all around the bottom of the cloud, a ring of small rainbows. Through the third lens, beneath one of the larger bowls, I could just see a cluster of buildings hanging upside down, with their roofs toward the earth and their windows lit, and a small figure on one of their balconies, leaning on the rail and looking down at us.

It was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen in my life.

I record that sentence because I am bound by my own rules of exactness to record it, and for no other reason. I do not intend to repeat it.

I stood at my window for seven minutes and thirteen seconds by my clock, which is the time it took for the shadow of the city in the clouds to pass over my shop. I measured the length of the shadow on the cobbles of Ropewalk Lane. It was four hundred and sixty feet from edge to edge where it crossed the lane. From that, and the speed of the drift, which I estimated at four miles an hour, I calculated the breadth of the city to be roughly two thousand three hundred feet at its widest. I also calculated, from the angle of the shadow and the height of Helios, the height of the tallest tower: two hundred and twelve feet, or twenty-one floors at ten feet a floor. Its owner had therefore labored at least twenty-two years upon it, cast his float spell upon each of his six bowls at least eight thousand and some hundreds of times, and lived the whole of that time three thousand feet above the ground with nothing whatever beneath him.

I found, when I had finished these calculations, that my hands had closed into fists, and that I was whistling very loud and very sharp. I had dropped the lady’s silver chain on the floor. I did not know how long I had been whistling. A little dust that had been floating in the window light had fallen to the sill all at once, as if knocked down, and my clogs had begun to glow.

I picked up the chain. I counted its links: eighty-three. I put it back on the bench. I raised the third lens of my goggles and took them off, and went back to my work, and did not look out of the window again.

It is a stupid city. It is built on nothing. It is steered by a committee. It is full of frogs. A competent mason could have done the whole of it in a fraction of the time, with honest stone, on honest ground, at a fraction of the cost.

And it is beautiful, and it floats, and no gnome has ever built anything like it. That is what I cannot forgive.

Of the Cost

The shadow passed. The people of Ropewalk Lane went back indoors, the children stopped shouting, and the afternoon went on as afternoons do. I finished the lady’s chain at four o’clock and set it aside for collection. At a little after five, with Helios going down and the light turning orange in the lane, the post came.

There was one letter. It was addressed to me in a fine hand on thick paper and sealed with the seal of the Gnomish Subscription Committee for the Great Undertaking of the North.

I knew what it was before I opened it. It was the same letter I had received at the end of each month for the past four years. It reminded the gnomes of Lapita, and of every other island where gnomes are found, of the progress of the Great Undertaking: the building, in the high hills of the north, of a city in the sky to rival the city of the mages. This city would not float. It would not be held up by spells, or bowls, or committees of dead mages’ great-grandchildren. It would fly, by honest machinery: rotors and windmills, gears and shafts and chains, the whole of it driven by steam and turned by the wind, held up in the air by the sheer force of gnomish engineering. It would prove to the world, once and for all, that magic was for people who could not use a file.

The letter reported, as it always did, that progress was excellent. It reported that the third great rotor had been successfully raised and was undergoing trials, and that the gnomes of the world could look forward with pride to the day, not far distant, when the Copter City would take to the air. It thanked me for my previous contributions and invited me to make another. It suggested ten gold.

I took a sheet of paper and a pen and set down the cost of the Great Undertaking to date, so far as it touched me. I have since copied it into my daybook. I set it down here also, without comment, since I have promised that this account will be exact.

My contributions to the Subscription Committee, over four years: two hundred and twelve gold, six silver, and four copper. This is more than I paid for the lease of my shop in all that time.

The increase in the price of pumice, of silver, of iron, of good oak, of fine files, and of tier one crystals, owing to the buying-up of all these things for the Great Undertaking: by my reckoning, an additional thirty-one gold, two silver over the same four years.

Commissions lost because I did not have the materials to fill them: nineteen.

My nephew Grenwick, who went north to work on the second rotor in the year 8609a, being a fine young engineer and very keen. He lost the third and fourth fingers of his left hand when a drive chain jumped its sprocket during the first trials. He will never hold a graver again. He writes that he is quite well and in good spirits and proud to have served. I do not believe him.

Gnomes killed in the trials of the first three rotors, according to the Committee’s own figures, which I believe to be low: eleven.

Gnomes injured: forty-three.

The number of times I have been told by the Committee that the Great Undertaking will be completed within the year: four.

The number of times it has been completed within the year: none.

The number of mages in the city in the clouds who are aware that the Great Undertaking exists: so far as I have been able to determine, none.

The number of mages in the city in the clouds who would care if they were: none.

I wrote the total at the bottom of the page and drew a line under it. I sat a long while looking at it, while the light went from orange to rose to gray in the window and the lamps came on in Ropewalk Lane. Then I took out my purse and counted out ten gold, as the letter suggested. I wrapped it in a twist of paper, addressed it to the Gnomish Subscription Committee for the Great Undertaking of the North, and set it on the corner of the bench to post in the morning.

I am not a fool. I know what it is costing. I have written it down. I know that the city of the mages is stupid and beautiful and floats, and that ours, when it is finished, if it is ever finished, will be sensible and ugly and loud and very likely will not fly. I know that we will not have proved anything to anyone except ourselves, and that we did not need to prove it to ourselves, since we already knew.

But I have seen the city in the clouds pass over my shop. It took seven minutes and thirteen seconds. And I stood at my window and looked at it, and I could not stand it. That is the whole of it. That is the cost of gnomish pride, precisely reckoned: two hundred and twenty-two gold, six silver, and four copper, as of this evening; two fingers of my nephew’s left hand; eleven dead; forty-three hurt; and the seven minutes and thirteen seconds that I would give everything I own to have never seen, and would give everything I own to see again.

I closed my daybook. I banked the forge. I took off my goggles, my apron, and my bracer, and hung each one on its hook. I noted, as I did so, that all three of them had stopped glowing. Then I put out the lamp, went upstairs to bed, and lay a long time in the dark, whistling very quietly. Before I slept I got up again, lit a candle, and drew on the back of the Committee’s letter a small and careful sketch of a better rotor, with a ratio of seven to three in the drive gear, and a split chain to keep it from jumping the sprocket. I shall send it north with the ten gold.

I put no magic in it. Magic is for people who cannot use a file.

• Segment 7: The Jaw of Iron Remembered

It came the way the tide comes in over a flat beach: first in thin bright tongues that run up the sand and slide back, and then, before you have noticed, the whole beach is under water, and there is nowhere to stand.

She was still holding the rope. That was the strange thing. Afterwards she would remember that her hand had never left it, the mooring line of the Prosperous Aunt, gray and tarred and fuzzy with age, creaking in her fist. Everything else went. The wharf went, and the bucket, and the roaring uncle with weed in his whiskers, and the gulls and the noon bell and the thin gold eclipse light thickening over the water. All of it went, slid away, dissolved like sugar in tea, and the rope remained, solid, rough, real. She held it, and it held her, and through it, like water through a pipe, the past came pouring in.

Sawdust. That was first. The smell of sawdust, fresh and pale and sweet, spread thick over packed earth in a great ring, so that the horses’ hooves made no sound. Sawdust and the sweat of horses and the hot oily smell of the lamps. Under it, faint and brown and sickly sweet, the burning sugar: the man by the entrance with his copper drum, spinning it, and the pink clouds rising out of it like breath on a frosty morning, winding onto paper sticks. The children walked away holding them up, pink clouds on sticks, their faces buried in them, their mouths pink and sticky, their eyes huge. Sugar clouds. She had eaten them herself, hundreds, thousands, all through her childhood, until she was sick of them, until the smell of them was the smell of every evening of her life. And she had never once, in all those years, thought it remarkable that one could eat a cloud.

And above the ring, above the sawdust and the horses and the children with their pink clouds, the tent.

Oh, the tent. Red and white, red and white, the great canvas stripes running up from the walls to the peak like the ribs of an umbrella, like the inside of a shell. The light came through the seams where the panels were laced together, thin bright lines of afternoon sun or, at night, the cold silver of the moon, and the whole vast dim space beneath it hummed. The ropes hummed. That was what she had forgotten, and what the rigging of Saltcoil had been trying all these days to tell her. The tent was held up by ropes, hundreds of them: guy lines and stays and the great king poles in the center, and the rigging of the high apparatus strung between them in long dark curves. When the wind blew across the open field where the tent was pitched, all the ropes sang together, a low, rising, falling hum. She had fallen asleep to it every night of her childhood in the wagon behind the tent, curled in her bunk, listening, the way she had fallen asleep these past days in the torn nets, listening to the rigging of the harbor.

The same sound. The very same.

She stood on the wharf with her hand on the rope and her face turned up to the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt, and she saw the tent.

She did not remember it. She saw it. That was the thing she could never afterwards make anyone understand. She did not remember it as one remembers a house one used to live in, a picture held up in the mind. She saw it, there, laid over the harbor like a painting on glass held up before a window. The mast was the king pole. The rigging was the high apparatus. The gray-gold sky was the canvas roof, the light coming through it in thin bright seams. The water below was the ring, and the boats were the wagons parked around its edge, and the gulls wheeling overhead were the swallows that nested in the peak of the tent all summer. Every evening the swallows would wheel and cry over the heads of the crowd when the lamps were lit, and the ringmaster would say, ladies and gentlemen, even the birds have come to see.

Both at once. Saltcoil and the tent, the tent and Saltcoil, the one shining through the other. She did not know which was real. She did not care.

The crowd. There was the crowd.

They filled the benches that rose in tiers all the way around the ring, up and up into the dim at the back where the lamplight did not reach. Hundreds of them, thousands on a good night, on a fair-day night, when the farmers came in from the country with their wives and children. They wore their best clothes, which smelled of mothballs and lavender. They carried their sugar clouds and their bags of hot roasted nuts, and they talked and laughed and called to one another across the benches. Then the band struck up and the lamps went down, and they fell quiet, all at once, a thousand people holding their breath. She had loved that silence more than anything. She had loved it more than the applause. The applause came after; the applause was for you. But the silence was for the thing you were about to do, the thing no one had seen yet, the thing that might go wrong.

And then her mother.

Her mother came out into the ring in the glare of the lamps in a costume of silver spangles that caught the light and threw it back in a thousand pieces. Her hair was pinned up tight under a little silver cap. Her arms were bare and strong and white with chalk to the elbow. She walked to the foot of the king pole and stood there, and looked up, and the whole crowd looked up with her.

Her mother. How could she have forgotten her mother?

Her name was Marguerite. It was a long, rolling, grand name, a name for a poster, and on the posters it was always printed in great red letters ten inches high: MADAME MARGUERITE, QUEEN OF THE AIR, THE JAW OF IRON, WITHOUT A NET. But to the circus folk she was only Marga, and to her daughter she was Maman. She had a laugh like a cart going over a bridge, sudden and loud and rattling. She smelled of chalk and rosin and violet water. She had hands like iron and teeth like a horse’s, big, strong, square, white. They were the strongest teeth in the whole wide world, she used to say, laughing, tapping them with her fingernail, tock, tock, so that her daughter, small in her lap, would laugh too.

Tock, tock.

The Jaw of Iron. Her mother’s act, and her mother’s mother’s before her, and then hers.

It went like this; she could see it, all of it, every moment, as clear as the mast in front of her. Her mother climbed. Not with ropes; the ropes were for later. She climbed the rope ladder up the side of the king pole, hand over hand, quick and light, as easily as a cat goes up a tree. She climbed to the little platform at the very top, under the peak of the tent, a hundred feet above the sawdust. She stood there, small and silver, and waved down at the crowd, and the crowd cheered. Then a rigger on the platform beside her swung out a rope on a pulley, a single rope, and on the end of it, the mouthpiece.

The bit, they called it. A small curved thing of hard leather and steel, made to fit her teeth exactly and no one else’s, by a dentist in the city who had spent a whole winter getting it right. Her mother had worn out eleven of them in her life. When she put it in her mouth and bit down, it locked between her jaws so that her whole weight could hang from it without crushing her teeth or tearing it loose.

She bit down. She stepped off the platform. And she hung.

By her teeth alone. A hundred feet above the sawdust, with her arms spread wide and her legs together and her toes pointed, her silver spangles throwing the lamplight back into the faces of the crowd. She was hanging from a single rope by nothing but the strength of her jaw, and the whole tent gasped. A thousand people breathed in at once, so that the canvas walls seemed to suck inward. Then the rigger below began to turn the rope. There was a swivel in it just above the bit, so that the rope could turn and the mouthpiece turn with it, and her mother began to spin.

Slowly at first. Then faster. Then faster still, until she was a blur, a silver blur, a seed spinning as it falls from the tree in autumn, turning and turning in the air. The light came off her in sheets and the band played faster and faster, and the drum rolled. Then, at the very height of it, at the very fastest, the drum stopped, and her mother let go of the swivel with one hand and threw back her head and spread her arms. She hung there, spinning, spinning, in the silence, and the crowd did not breathe at all.

And then the applause. Oh, the applause. It came up from the benches like a wave breaking, like a storm on a tin roof, like a flock of birds rising all at once from a field. The voices. Hundreds, thousands of voices, shouting and cheering and crying out her name, Marguerite, Marguerite, Madame Marguerite. They threw their voices up into the air at her, up and up into the peak of the tent, so that the canvas trembled with them, so that the swallows rose in a panic and wheeled shrieking around the king pole. And the children threw flowers, little posies of daisies and buttercups and wild roses brought from the fields. They could not throw them high enough, of course, and the flowers fell back into the sawdust of the ring. But the voices went up. The voices reached her. Like flowers. Like a whole field of flowers thrown up into the air.

And then later, years later, it was not her mother in the silver spangles. It was her.

Lise. Her name was Lise.

There it was. There it was, at last, the name. It had come to her in the nets in the dark of night and slipped away before she could hold it. Now it came back, short and bright, called out across the ring in her mother’s voice, with her mother’s laugh in it: Lise! Lise, come here, look at this! Lise, sit up straight! Lise, Lise, my little lark! Lise, little Lise, Annelise on the posters when she was older, but Lise to everyone who loved her. And Lise, standing now on the wharf of Saltcoil with her hand on the mooring line of the Prosperous Aunt, felt the name settle into her like a key into a lock, and began to laugh. Lise. And Velisse. Velisse, the name of the serpent woman. Ve-LISSE. It had been there all along, inside the other name, curled up in it like a child in a bunk, like a snake in a basket. She had come down out of the sky, starving, and chosen out of all the empty cups in Saltcoil the one whose name had her own name hidden inside it.

She laughed, and the tears ran down her face, and she did not wipe them away.

A gull settled on the rail of the Prosperous Aunt and looked at her sideways out of one yellow eye, thinking about fish. On the deck above, a sailor coiling a line paused and looked down at the weeping, laughing serpent woman on the wharf and thought, poor creature, one of the new ones, and thought of his own first month in this world: how he had woken in a body that was not his and wept over a bowl of porridge without knowing why. Then he went back to his coiling. And Lise, who was Velisse, who was both, saw the gull and the sailor and the rail and the deck. She saw the sawdust and the swallows and the silver spangles, and did not know which world she was in, and did not want to know. She wanted to stay there forever, in both at once, with the tent shining through the harbor and the harbor shining through the tent.

She had done it too. The Jaw of Iron. She had done it for years.

She had started on the low rope when she was nine, with the net under her and her mother standing beside the net with her arms folded, frowning, watching every move. When she was thirteen they made her her first bit, at the dentist in the city, all one winter, fitted to her teeth, which were not as big as her mother’s, nor as strong, but strong enough. She went up the king pole for the first time when she was fifteen, with the net below. She did it for the first time without the net at nineteen, on a fair-day night in the late summer, with the tent full to the very back benches and the swallows wheeling.

She remembered the platform. She remembered standing there, a hundred feet up, in her own silver spangles, with the bit in her teeth and the whole tent spread out below her, the crowd’s upturned faces like a field of pale flowers. She remembered stepping off. She remembered the jolt as the rope took her weight, the shock of it running up through her jaw and her skull and down her spine to her pointed toes. She remembered the spin, and the faces whirling past, and the lamps streaming into lines of light. She remembered the drum, faster and faster. She remembered the stop.

And the silence. And her own arms flung wide in it. And the voices coming up, coming up, like flowers.

She had been the second best. She would admit that now, here, on the wharf at Saltcoil, a whole world away, where there was nobody to hear but a gull. She had been the second best at the Jaw of Iron in all the world, and her mother had been the first. She had never minded. Second to Marguerite was better than first to anyone else. Though she had told the other girls in the troupe that she was the best, and told the posters, and told the newspapers, and told everyone in all the towns they passed through. And she had been the loudest. That much was certain. She had always been the loudest. She had shouted at the top of the spin, Hup! Hup! Hup! so that the crowd would shout back, and they always had.

Then the years came down on her like snow.

She saw them, one after another, in the striped light of the tent that was also the gold light of the harbor. The years of touring, of wagons and fields and towns, rain on canvas, mud in the ring, fair-day nights and empty Tuesday nights. Her mother growing old, and slow, and gray under the silver cap. Her mother’s last performance, the drum rolling and stopping, and the old woman spinning in the silence, the crowd on its feet. Then the long, slow afterwards: her mother in a chair by the wagon door, watching her daughter go up the king pole, with her arms folded and her strong square teeth clamped tight, frowning, the way she had frowned beside the net when Lise was nine. Her mother’s death, one winter, in the wagon, with the ropes humming in the wind outside.

And then her own years. Her own slowing. Her own teeth.

The teeth go first, her mother had said once, long ago, tapping her own with a fingernail, tock, tock. The teeth go first, little lark, and the heart goes last, and that is the cruelty of it.

Her teeth had gone first. One cracked, then another. A third came loose and had to be pulled. Then the dentist in the city could no longer fit a bit to them, no matter how he tried. She was forty-four years old and could not hang from a rope by her jaw any more, and so she came down. She never went up again. The circus moved on without her, as circuses do. She lived for years afterwards in a small room above a bakery in a town she did not care for. The smell of the baking sugar came up through the floorboards every morning and every evening, and every morning and every evening she wept at it, and did not know why. There was no rope. There was no tent. There were no ropes humming in the wind outside. There were only her false teeth in a glass beside the bed, and the sugar smell, and the slow years.

And at the end, in that small room, an old woman in a narrow bed, she had closed her eyes and seen the tent. She had seen the silver spangles and the faces in the lamplight and the swallows and the king pole. She had felt the jolt of the rope taking her weight, and heard the drum stop. And she had thought, with her last breath, oh, once more. Only once more. Just to be up there once more, with the voices coming up.

And then the dark. And then the falling.

She was standing on a wharf. She was holding a rope. She was a serpent woman with green scales and gold eyes and a long, long body coiled on the boards behind her. She was crying. The gull had flown away. She put her free hand up to her mouth, slowly, trembling, the way an old woman reaches for something on a high shelf. With her fingertips she touched her teeth.

Her fangs. Long and smooth and curving, hanging down past her lower lip, cool and hard as the inside of a shell. She tapped them with her fingernail. Tock. Tock.

They were young. They were whole. They were stronger, she thought, standing there with her fingertip on the long curve of the right fang, stronger by far than any teeth her mother had ever had. Than any teeth anyone in that whole other world had ever had. They were not teeth for chewing. They were teeth for seizing, for holding on, for gripping a struggling fish and never letting go. And the jaw behind them, the long serpent jaw that could open wide enough to swallow a herring whole, was stronger still. She could feel the muscles of it under the scales of her cheeks, coiled and waiting, like a spring.

Oh. Oh.

And there was something else, underneath the tent and the spangles and the voices. It was not hers. Or it had not been hers, until a few days ago, until she fell and the cup opened and she went in. It was the other one’s, Velisse’s, the quiet gentle lonely serpent woman of Saltcoil who had lain on the old sea wall at the end of the farthest wharf every afternoon of her life, looking up at the masts. It was a longing. A plain, wordless, aching longing to be up there among the ropes and the wind where the masts met the sky. Velisse had never had a word for it. She had never had a reason for it. She had never known that anyone had ever hung from a rope by their teeth, a hundred feet above a crowd, with their arms spread wide. She had simply looked up, all her life, and wanted.

Two longings. One from each side, from each of the two strands now twisted together into a single rope. The old woman in the narrow bed above the bakery, wanting once more, only once more. And the quiet serpent on the warm wall, wanting, without knowing what she wanted. The two longings met in her now, here, on this wharf, at the foot of this mast, and wound together and pulled tight. And they were not two longings any more. They were one. They were hunger.

The same hunger, she thought dizzily, that had brought her falling down out of the sky. The same vast, vertiginous, terrible hunger, the hunger like a cliff edge, the hunger that said jump, you were made for this. But now it had somewhere to go. Now it had a shape. Now it had a mast and a rope and a pair of young, strong, curving fangs.

Somebody was speaking to her.

She heard it as one hears voices in another room. Muffled, distant, meaning nothing. A low voice, gravelly, rolling like a hull in a swell. She turned her head, slowly, still holding the rope, and saw through the shining overlay of the tent an old dwarf standing on the wharf a few yards away. He was broad and short, with a white beard braided into three thick salt-crusted ropes and fastened with brass rings. He wore a black oilskin hat, a heavy blue coat with two rows of brass buttons, and a chain across his chest with a medallion on it. His arms were folded. His right eye was screwed into a squint, and he was looking at her as she had once seen her mother look at a young rigger who had tied a knot wrong.

“Serpent woman,” he was saying. “Serpent woman, do you hear me? That mast is not for you. That mast is for crew. You will come away from that gangplank.”

She looked at him. She did not know who he was. She did not know, for a moment, what he was saying. He was so solid, standing there in the gold light with his arms folded. He was so plainly part of the harbor and not the tent, so plainly of this world and not the other, that he seemed to her almost comical, like a stagehand who has wandered out into the ring in the middle of the act. Somewhere behind him a tall thin heron-folk boy was hopping from one foot to the other, flapping.

“Do you hear me?” said the old dwarf again.

And she smiled at him. She did not mean to. She did not mean anything by it. But it came up from somewhere deep in her chest, where the hunger was, and spread over her face. It was a wide, slow, shining smile, the smile her mother used to give the crowd from the top of the king pole, the smile that said wait, only wait, and you will see something you have never seen. She smiled at him with her young strong fangs bare and her gold eyes still wet with tears.

The old dwarf’s arms, if such a thing were possible, folded tighter.

“Harrumph,” he said.

And then the light changed.

It went dim. Not the thin gray of the eclipse, which was nearly over now, but a sudden soft shadow sliding over the whole harbor from east to west, as when a cloud passes in front of the sun. All along the wharf people stopped and looked up. The dockhands stopped unloading the crates. The fishwives stopped gutting the fish. Merran, the big freckled lizard-folk woman, stopped halfway along the wharf with her dripping, grumbling uncle behind her. She shaded her eyes with her hand and said, well, look at that, it’s come over again; and her uncle Brek, still wringing out his whiskers, looked up and forgot for a moment to be cross.

Up Ropewalk Lane, at the window of a silversmith’s shop, an old gnome with brass goggles on his forehead swung down a third lens before his eye and stood quite still. He would stand there seven minutes and thirteen seconds and count every one of them, and his fists would close at his sides, and he would whistle without knowing it, very loud and very sharp.

The gap-toothed tavern girl came out of the back door of the tavern with a bucket of peelings and stopped and looked up. She thought, oh, it’s beautiful. She thought, I wonder what it’s like up there. She thought, I’ll never know, will I, and went back in.

On the very last piling at the end of the farthest wharf, though it was not yet evening and she was not yet counting ships, an old shellback grandmother with a mossy shell lifted her old head and looked up at the shadow passing. Then she looked down the long wharf toward the inner harbor, toward the tall ship and the small green figure at the foot of its gangplank. She clicked her beak, once, softly.

And Old Dunmoor Saltbeard, harbor master, with his arms folded on the wharf before the Prosperous Aunt, glanced up for a single moment at the great soft heap of white passing three thousand feet above. He looked down again at the serpent woman, and frowned more deeply than before.

Lise looked up.

It was a cloud. It was a great white cloud, broad and soft, gold at the edges, drifting slowly over the harbor from east to west. But it was not a cloud. Even without the old gnome’s lens she could see it, as the eclipse light cleared and the shadow passed. She saw the towers in the mist, the hundred white and gray and red towers, the long fine cables between them like rigging, and the small bright moving points of the bird folk wheeling and calling. Thin bright threads of water fell from somewhere inside the cloud and broke into spray, and the spray made a ring of small rainbows all around the bottom of it, like spangles. A whole city, floating in the sky. A whole city of towers and ropes and wheeling birds, three thousand feet above the harbor, held up by nothing, by nothing at all.

The canvas peak of the tent shone through it. The swallows wheeled. The drum rolled.

Ladies and gentlemen, said the ringmaster’s voice in her head, rolling and grand, even the birds have come to see.

She laughed aloud. She could not help it. It burst out of her, loud and rattling, like a cart going over a bridge, like her mother’s laugh, and the old dwarf took half a step back. The heron-folk boy stopped hopping and stared. Up on the deck of the Prosperous Aunt the sailor coiling the line looked over the rail again, and Merran, halfway down the wharf, turned her head.

In a world where whole cities hung in the sky on nothing, where the sun could be eaten and given back, where a woman could fall out of the dark and wake inside a serpent, why should a serpent woman not hang by her teeth from a mast?

Why not? Why not?

And the decision came.

It did not come as a thought. It did not come in words. It came as a heartbeat comes, single and heavy and certain, somewhere in the very middle of her. It was the way the drum stops at the top of the spin, the way the rope jolts when it takes your weight, the way the voices of a thousand people come up all at once into the peak of the tent. One beat. Thud. And everything in her, the old woman in the narrow bed and the quiet serpent on the warm wall, the tent and the harbor, the sugar clouds and the herring, Lise and Velisse, all of it at once, said yes.

Yes. I will do this again.

She said it in her heart, standing there on the wharf in the passing shadow of the city in the clouds, with her hand on the rope and her face turned up to the mast. She said it plainly, the way one makes a vow:

I will do this thing again in this world. I will climb to the top of that mast, and I will bite down on the rope, and I will let go. I will hang by my mouth over the harbor, and I will spin, and I will spread my arms in the silence at the top of the spin. And the sailors will throw their voices up at me like flowers.

And then, because she was Lise, and Lise had always been practical about such things, and because she had been living for a fortnight on gifts of herring:

And also small coins.

The shadow passed. The gold light came back over the harbor, whole and warm, the eclipse thinning at last to nothing as the great banded world slid away from the face of Helios. The city in the clouds drifted on westward over the roofs, smaller and smaller, until it was only a cloud again, a bright soft heap of white on the far horizon. The people on the wharf went back to their crates and their fish and their grumbling uncles. The old gnome in Ropewalk Lane took off his goggles. The grandmother on her piling closed her eyes. And Old Dunmoor Saltbeard stood with his arms folded before the gangplank of the Prosperous Aunt, looking at the serpent woman, waiting for her to come away.

She let go of the mooring line at last. Her hand had cramped around it. She flexed the fingers slowly, one by one, and looked at the white chalky dust of dried salt and tar on her palm. She rubbed her hands together the way her mother used to rub chalk into hers before a climb, slow and thorough, palm against palm. Then she turned and looked at the old dwarf, and smiled again, that wide slow shining smile with her fangs bare.

“Not today,” she said, in her long soft hissing voice, so that he would not have to tell her again. “Not today.”

And she flowed away down the wharf toward the city, smoothly, beautifully, the long ripple running clean from her head all the way to the tip of her tail, without once stumbling. She did not trip. She did not catch on the boards. It was the first time since she had fallen out of the sky that her body had moved as a serpent’s body ought to move, like water poured from the lip of a jug, like a rope paying out from a coil. She did not even notice.

Behind her the old dwarf stood a long while with his arms folded, watching her go. When at last he turned back toward his office his face was very grave. The heron-folk boy at his side asked what it meant, what she had meant by not today. The harbor master said only, “It means tomorrow, dockhand. It always means tomorrow.”

And high above them, on the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt, at the very top, the rope swung back and forth, back and forth in the wind off the sea, humming.

• Segment 8: A Pot Breaking in the Next House

It is a curious fact, and one the reader may have observed in his own acquaintance, that a man who has spent forty-one years expecting a particular disaster will very often, when it finally arrives, fail to recognize it. He has pictured it so many times, and in such detail, and with such a fine accumulation of dread, that the real thing, when it comes, seems a poor shabby imitation of the one he imagined. It is too small, too ordinary, too ridiculous. It is not the disaster at all, he tells himself. It is only a joke. And so he laughs at it.

That is what Old Dunmoor Saltbeard did, on the morning of Conjursday, the first day of the week of Darkness, in the month of Lathandus, in the year 8612a.

He laughed.

He had not slept well. He would have denied this if asked, and nobody would have dared to ask. But he had lain awake a long while in his narrow bed, in his narrow room above the chandler’s shop on Wharf Street, listening to the wind. It had gone round in the night from the east into the north and brought the cold of the week of Darkness down on Saltcoil like a lid on a pot. He had thought of the serpent woman’s smile, that wide, slow, shining smile with the fangs bare, and of the words she had said: Not today. He had turned over and folded his arms beneath the blanket, which is not easy to do, and told himself that it meant nothing. She was one of the new ones, addled with the forgetting sickness. She could not walk without falling over her own tail, so how should she climb a mast? She would forget the whole business by morning, as the new ones forgot most things. And besides, there was the rule.

No one climbs in my harbor who is not crew about the business of the ship.

The rule would hold. The rule had held for forty-one years. He had built it with his own hands, brick by brick, and it was the strongest wall in Saltcoil. He took a certain comfort in that. He fell asleep at last, a little before three, with his arms still folded and the comfort in them.

He rose at a quarter to four and dressed, and went down into the street. The cold struck him in the face like a wet sail. Frost lay on the cobbles of Wharf Street in a thin gray rime that crunched under his boots, and his breath went up before him in clouds. The sky over the harbor was the color of a slate roof. Helios would be up in an hour, but in the week of Darkness the light came late and grudgingly, and left early, and never seemed to warm anything while it was there. He walked to his office, unlocked the bruise-blue door, lit the stove, which smoked, and the lamp, which flickered. He hung his storm coat on the third hook from the left and polished the buttons, left row first, top to bottom. He opened the three ledgers of the day and wrote the date at the head of a fresh page in the Ledger of Arrivals: 8612a2.7.1. Then he folded his arms and looked out of the small round window at the harbor.

He could see the masts of the inner wharves from his window, as he always could. He could see the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt, tallest of them all, standing up black against the slate-gray sky, its rigging furred white with frost. There was nothing on it. He looked a long while to be sure. There was nothing on it at all.

He unfolded his arms just long enough to blot the date, and folded them again.

At half past five Quillimore Drabb arrived, hung his thin coat on the fourth hook from the left, and sighed at the cold. At a quarter to six the first caller came, a fishwife with a complaint about the price of ice. At six there was another. At half past six there was a third, and the harbor master had begun to think that the day would be a day like any other.

At a quarter to seven Tadge Weatherby came through the bruise-blue door.

He did not come through it as violently as he had the day before; the harbor master’s look on that occasion had made a deep impression on him. He opened it carefully, and closed it carefully, and stood carefully on the mat. But his long gray feathers were standing straight up on end from the crown of his head to the back of his neck, and his long beak was opening and closing without any sound coming out. His knees, all four joints of them, were knocking together like a bag of clothes-pegs.

“Dockhand,” said Old Dunmoor.

“She’s on it, sir,” said Tadge Weatherby.

The harbor master’s arms tightened. “On what?”

“The Prosperous Aunt, sir. The mainmast. The serpent woman, sir. She’s on it. She’s climbing it. Now. This minute.”

There was a silence in the harbor office. Quillimore Drabb, who had been about to sigh, held the sigh in and did not let it out.

“That is not possible,” said Old Dunmoor. His voice was very quiet. “No one climbs in my harbor who is not crew about the business of the ship. That is the rule. The crew of the Prosperous Aunt know the rule. The mate of the Prosperous Aunt knows the rule. If the mate of the Prosperous Aunt has permitted a serpent woman with the forgetting sickness to climb his mainmast, I will have his papers and his ship’s papers and—”

“That’s the thing, sir,” said Tadge Weatherby miserably. “She is crew, sir.”

“She is what?”

“Crew, sir. Mister Larkspur signed her on. The mate, sir. This morning, before Helios up. As a hand, sir. Ordinary hand, for one day, at wages of one copper. She made her mark on the articles, sir, I saw it. A sort of squiggle, sir, like a snake. And then Mister Larkspur said she was crew, and it was the business of the ship to see what she could do, and the whole crew laughed. And then they all started betting, sir. On how high she’d get. And she started climbing.”

The harbor master unfolded his arms.

It was, Quillimore Drabb would say afterwards, the first time he had seen it happen outside the lull in nineteen years. He would describe it to his mother that evening over a supper of boiled whelks, in a hushed and reverent voice, as other men might describe an eclipse or a comet. The harbor master unfolded his arms, and stood up from his high stool, and took his storm coat from the third hook from the left without even stopping to polish the buttons. He went out through the bruise-blue door into the cold, still putting the coat on, and Quillimore Drabb, after a moment of the deepest consideration, did a thing he had never done before. He left the office unattended, took his own thin coat from the fourth hook, and followed.

Now, the reader must understand that Mister Obed Larkspur, first mate of the Prosperous Aunt, was no fool. He was a lean, sardonic, iron-gray orc of about fifty, with one tusk broken off short and a long, slow, dry way of talking that made everything he said sound like the punch line of a joke nobody else had heard. He had sailed in and out of the harbor of Saltcoil for twenty-two years. He knew the harbor master’s rule as well as he knew his own name. He knew, too, as every sailor in Saltcoil knew, that the harbor master’s rule said nothing whatever about who might be crew. It said only that no one might climb who was not. And so, when the serpent woman came flowing up the gangplank of the Prosperous Aunt in the gray cold before dawn and asked him, in her long soft hissing voice, if she might climb his mainmast, Mister Larkspur had looked at her a long while out of his small dry eyes. Then he had taken out the ship’s articles, and a pen.

“It’s a joke, sir,” he said, when the harbor master came marching up the wharf with his storm coat flapping open and his face like thunder. “It’s a joke, and it’s the law. Both at once. The best kind.” He leaned on the rail of the Prosperous Aunt, picking his teeth with a splinter. “She’s crew. Signed and sealed. You can look at the articles if you like.”

The harbor master looked at the articles. There it was, in Mister Larkspur’s hand: Velisse, serpentfolk, of Saltcoil, rated Ordinary Hand, for one day, at wages of one copper. Beside it there was a mark like a coiled snake, done with a shaky, sprawling pen by someone who had plainly never held one before.

He looked at it a long time. He looked at the date and the rating and the wages and the mark. He looked for a flaw, any flaw, a word out of place, a missing seal, anything at all that might let him say that the articles were void and the serpent woman was not crew and must come down at once. There was no flaw. Mister Larkspur had been very careful. The articles were in perfect order. It was the law.

Old Dunmoor Saltbeard handed back the articles, and folded his arms, and looked up.

There was a crowd. Of course there was a crowd. There is always a crowd in Saltcoil whenever anything happens, and very often when nothing does. This was something, and the crowd had come running from every wharf and warehouse and tavern in the harbor to see it. The whole crew of the Prosperous Aunt hung in the rigging and leaned on the rails, laughing and calling out and waving their caps. The crews of the ships moored on either side had come to their own rails and their own rigging to watch. On the wharf below there were dockhands and fishwives and porters and carters and children. Mister Ambrose Fettle, of Fettle and Fettle, Dealers in Salt and Sundries, stood red and round and quivering in a great fur coat, holding a fistful of coins and taking bets. The Widow Tansy Pellingworth was shouting at him that he was a robber. Big freckled Merran from the Gull’s Daughter stood with her arms crossed and her uncle Brek beside her, both of them staring up with their wide jaws hanging open. And all of them, every single one, were looking up at the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt.

And on the mainmast was the serpent woman.

She was about a third of the way up, near the main top, the broad wooden platform where the lower mast ended and the topmast began. And it must be said, in fairness to all those who laughed, the harbor master among them, that she was a very funny sight indeed.

A mast is not made for a serpent. It is made for sailors. Sailors have hands and feet and climb the rigging by the ratlines, the little rope rungs strung across the shrouds like the steps of a ladder, one foot after another, one hand after another, quick and easy. The serpent woman had hands, but no feet. She had tried, it seemed, to climb the ratlines anyway, and her long green body had got itself tangled in them. Her tail had gone through one rung and back out through another, then looped around a shroud and come back through a third. Now she hung there in a great tangled knot of rope and serpent, halfway between the deck and the main top, with her hands clutching at the ratlines above. Her body was twisted around them like a vine around a trellis, and the last six feet of her tail waved wildly in the empty air below like a pennant in a gale.

“She’s fouled!” roared a sailor from the main yard. “She’s fouled her lines! Somebody bring a marlinspike!”

“Bring a fishing net!” bellowed another. “She’ll come down like a herring!”

“Two copper says she’s off by the main top!” shouted Mister Fettle, waving his coins.

“Four says she’s off before!” cried the Widow Pellingworth, who had decided that if she could not stop the robbery she might as well profit by it.

And the serpent woman, tangled in the ratlines, twisted her long body around, laughing herself, the harbor master saw with some surprise. She laughed a loud rattling laugh like a cart going over a bridge, and somehow worked her tail free of the rungs it was caught in, one loop at a time. Then she did a thing that made the whole crowd fall silent for a moment, and then laugh harder than ever.

She let go of the ratlines entirely, and coiled herself around the mast.

It was what she ought to have done from the first, of course. It was what any serpent would have done, if the serpent had ever wanted to climb a mast. It was the way serpents climb trees: not by steps and rungs, but by coiling, wrapping themselves around the trunk in a long tight spiral and drawing themselves upward a coil at a time. But to see a great green serpent woman do it on the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt was the most absurd thing anyone in Saltcoil had ever seen. Her long body wound round and round the mast like a stripe on a barber’s pole. Her arms reached up and pulled, and her tail squeezed and pushed, and the whole length of her wriggled upward an inch at a time, while the frost on the mast crumbled under her scales and fell like snow on the heads of the crowd below. It was like watching a sock climb a broom handle. It was like watching a rope climb itself.

The crowd howled. The sailors in the rigging howled. Mister Larkspur, on the rail, laughed so hard that he dropped his splinter. Merran laughed. Her uncle Brek laughed until he had to sit down on a bollard and wipe his eyes. The children laughed and shrieked and pointed and danced. Mister Fettle laughed so hard his whole round body quivered like a jelly in an earthquake, and he forgot to take bets.

And the harbor master laughed too.

It burst out of him before he could stop it. It came up from somewhere deep in his barrel of a chest, from some place that had been shut up and locked and forgotten for a very long time. It was a great booming, roaring, rumbling laugh, like a load of barrels rolling down a gangplank. It was a laugh that no living person in Saltcoil had ever heard from him. It rang out over the wharf so loud that everyone near him turned and stared. Quillimore Drabb, who had come up behind him unnoticed, very nearly fell into the harbor from sheer astonishment.

He laughed. He could not help it. His arms were still folded, but they shook. His beard crackled. His squinted eye ran with tears. It was so absurd, so perfectly, wonderfully absurd: a serpent on a mast, like a fish on a horse, wriggling up a pole with the whole harbor laughing at her. And he had been afraid. He had lain awake half the night afraid. He had pictured disaster, and blood, and the black water between the hull and the dock, and the narrow black ledger in the drawer of his desk with room in it for one more name. And here it was, his disaster: a serpent woman wriggling up a mast like a sock up a broom handle.

He laughed with relief, because the disaster was not a disaster at all but a joke. He laughed with pride, because he had been right: a serpent had no business on a mast, and here was the proof of it, for all the harbor to see. And he laughed, it must be said, though he would never have admitted it, with a certain mean small pleasure in being right while someone else was being foolish. It is not a fine emotion. It is not an emotion anyone is proud of. But it is a very common one, and it was a long while since Old Dunmoor Saltbeard had allowed himself any emotion at all, and he had perhaps forgotten how to choose.

“She’ll never reach the main top!” he roared, between gusts of laughter. “She’ll never reach it! A serpent on a mast! Did ever you see such a thing, Clerk? Did ever you see it?”

“No, sir,” said Quillimore Drabb faintly. He had never seen the harbor master laugh either, and was not sure which astonished him more.

She reached the main top.

She coiled herself over the lip of the broad wooden platform, and lay there a moment, and the crowd cheered ironically and clapped. Mister Fettle paid out to three people and took in from four. Then she raised her head and looked up at the topmast above her, and began to climb again.

She was quicker now. The harbor master saw it, and his laughter, without his noticing, grew a little less loud. She had found the trick of it on the lower mast. She did not tangle or slip any more, or flail. She wound herself around the topmast in a long smooth spiral and drew herself up it coil by coil, steadily, almost gracefully, with her arms reaching and her tail pushing and the long ripple running down her green body from head to tail. The frost fell from the mast in a fine glittering shower. She passed the topsail yard. She passed the topgallant yard. She was eighty feet above the deck, then ninety, then a hundred.

The laughter on the wharf began, here and there, to falter.

It did not stop. The sailors went on calling out to her, and Mister Fettle went on taking bets, and the children went on pointing. But there was something different in the sound of it now. There was a strain in it, a note of uncertainty, the way laughter sounds at a party when somebody has told a joke that has gone on just a little too long. Some of the faces in the crowd were no longer laughing at all. They were only looking up.

The harbor master was still laughing. But it was a smaller laugh now, and his arms had begun to tighten.

She reached the top.

The very top. The main truck of the Prosperous Aunt, the round wooden cap at the peak of the topgallant mast, a hundred and forty feet above the deck. No one but a rigger had stood there in all the years the ship had been in harbor. From the wharf below it was a small round black dot against the slate-gray sky, and the serpent woman, coiled around the mast just beneath it, was a small green twist of color, like a ribbon tied to the top of a pole.

From the truck there ran a single line: the signal halyard, a thin rope that ran up through a block at the very peak and down again to the deck, for hoisting flags. It swung there in the cold wind beside her, swaying, back and forth, back and forth.

The serpent woman reached out, slowly, and took it in one hand.

The crowd went quiet. Not all at once. It went the way a fire goes out, flickering, the laughter dying here and there across the wharf, until only Mister Fettle was still talking. He was saying something about odds. Then the Widow Pellingworth hit him on the arm and he stopped too.

The harbor master had stopped laughing. He did not know when. His arms were folded so tight that his buttons creaked.

The serpent woman, at the top of the mast, drew the halyard toward her. She looked at it a moment, the harbor master thought, the way one looks at an old friend. Then she put it in her mouth and bit down.

And she let go.

She let go with her hands. She let go with her arms. She let go, slowly, deliberately, coil by coil, from the mast itself, unwinding her long body from it until the very last loop of her tail slid free of the wood. And she hung.

A hundred and forty feet above the deck of the Prosperous Aunt, from a single thin halyard, by her teeth alone.

Her long green body hung straight down beneath her head like a pendulum, her tail just brushing the topgallant yard below. Her arms spread wide on either side. Her face was turned up to the gray sky, and the halyard ran taut from between her fangs to the block at the peak. And she swayed, back and forth, back and forth, in the wind off the sea.

Nobody on the wharf made a sound.

The harbor master looked up at her, and something went through him that he had not felt in forty-one years. It began somewhere under his folded arms, where his heart was, and spread out through the whole of him like the cold of the week of Darkness. It was not laughter. It was not relief. It was not pride. It was something very much like the feeling a man has when he is standing on the deck of a ship in a storm and hears, somewhere in the dark above, the long slow groan of a mast beginning to give.

She began to spin.

Slowly at first. She turned on the end of the halyard as a leaf turns on a branch, once, and again. Her arms were still spread and her body still hung straight, and the green of her scales caught the thin gray light of the morning and threw it back in a soft shimmer. She turned again, and a little faster. Someone in the crowd, a child, said “Oh” in a small high voice. And the harbor master saw, high up at the peak of the mast, her face. It was turned up to the sky and spinning, with the halyard between her fangs, and on it was a look he would never forget as long as he lived. It was joy. Pure, plain, perfect joy, like a child’s on the first warm morning of spring.

And then there came a sound.

It was not a loud sound. That was the terrible thing about it, afterwards, when he thought of it. It was not loud at all. It came down from the top of the mast through the cold still air, small and sharp and quite distinct, the way a sound carries from one house to the next on a quiet winter night. It was exactly like the sound of a pot breaking in the next house: a crack, sudden and brittle, small and ordinary and final, a sound that makes you look up from your supper and say, what was that? and then go back to your supper, because it is nothing to do with you.

Crack.

Her right fang. It was her right fang that cracked.

The harbor master saw it. He was looking straight at her. He saw her head jerk sideways at the top of the spin. He saw the halyard slip from between her teeth. He saw something small and pale fly off into the gray air and vanish. And he saw her face change, all at once, from joy into something else.

And she fell.

The fall was long. It was the longest thing the harbor master had ever seen. She fell straight down the mast, turning slowly in the air, her long green body unspooling behind her like a ribbon dropped from a window. She struck the topgallant yard with a sound like a sack of meal, and it bent and sprang back and threw her outward. She struck the furled topsail on the yard below, and the thick frozen canvas took her weight a moment and gave way. She tumbled off it and down, past the main yard, past the main top, past the lower shrouds. Then she struck the deck of the Prosperous Aunt, flat, full length, with a noise like a sack of grain thrown down from a wagon.

Thud.

And lay there.

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The whole wharf, the whole crowd, the crews of three ships in the rigging and at the rails, all of them stood frozen in the cold gray light, as though the frost had come down on them too. The halyard swung back and forth at the top of the mast, back and forth, empty. A gull came down out of the sky and settled on the rail of the Prosperous Aunt and looked at the serpent woman on the deck out of one yellow eye.

Then someone laughed.

It was one of the sailors in the rigging, a young one. It was not a cruel laugh. It was the laugh that comes out of a person when something has happened that is too big and too sudden to understand, and the body must do something, and that is the only thing it can think of. It was high and thin and strange. And then another sailor laughed, and another, and some of the dockhands on the wharf. It spread through the crowd raggedly, uncertainly, the way the first laugh had spread when the serpent woman tangled herself in the ratlines. But it was not the same laugh. It was not the same at all. It was the laugh of people who have just seen something terrible and do not want to believe that it was.

The harbor master did not laugh.

He was going up the gangplank. He did not remember starting. He was on the deck of the Prosperous Aunt, pushing past Mister Larkspur, who had stopped smiling. And he was standing over her, looking down.

She was not dead. He saw that first, and something in his chest that had been clenched tight as a fist since the crack unclenched. She was not dead. Her long green body lay sprawled across the deck from the mainmast nearly to the rail, bent in places it should not have bent. One arm was flung out, and the other twisted under her. Her gold eyes were open and looking up at the sky. She was breathing, in short, shallow, rattling breaths. And her health was running out of her. He could see it, the way one can always see such things in Saṃsāra if one looks. It was running out of her like water from a basket, draining away and away and away until there was hardly any left at all, the barest trickle, the last drop clinging to the weave.

She should have died. A fall like that, a hundred and forty feet onto an oak deck, should have killed her outright. It would have killed anyone else. But she had struck the yard, and the sail, and they had broken her fall. And something else, perhaps, had held her too. He did not know what. The old fishwives said that every new one who falls out of the sky brings a little spark with them, a little silver fire, enough to hold back death once, and only once. The harbor master did not believe in old fishwives’ stories. But he believed what he saw. What he saw was a serpent woman who ought to have been dead, lying on the deck, breathing.

And her mouth.

There was blood on it. Not much. Her right fang, the long pale curving thing that had hung down over her lip, was gone. Not all of it; the root was still there, jagged and broken off short like a snapped bone, bleeding a little at the gum. The rest of it was somewhere on the deck, or over the side, or lost in the harbor. Her left fang was cracked down its whole length, a fine dark line running from the root nearly to the tip.

She was not crying. That was the thing he would remember. She was not crying, or moaning, or calling out. She was lying there on the deck with her health run out and her fang broken and her body bent, looking up past him at the top of the mast, where the halyard still swung. On her face there was still, faintly, beneath the pain, the ghost of that look of joy.

The harbor master stood over her with his arms folded and felt something turn over inside him.

It was shame.

He did not recognize it at first, any more than he had recognized the disaster. He had not felt it in a very long time. It came up into his throat like bile. It was hot and sour, and it tasted of the laugh he had laughed on the wharf, that great booming, roaring, rumbling laugh. He had laughed at her. He had stood on the wharf with the crowd and laughed at her tangled in the ratlines, and at her wriggling up the mast like a sock up a broom handle. He had laughed because he was right and she was foolish. He had taken a small mean pleasure in it. And now here she lay on the deck with her fang broken and her health run out of her like water from a basket. She had been in pain the whole time she climbed, perhaps: in pain, or afraid, or both, and determined anyway, with the whole harbor laughing at her. He had laughed loudest.

It was my festival. I gave the permission. I let them climb.

He had not given the permission this time. Mister Larkspur had, with his articles and his pen. And the law had allowed it, and he had been bound by the law. It was not on his head. It was not.

He had laughed.

A young sailor came pushing through the crowd on the deck. He was the cocky, freckle-faced, sunburnt youth who had come into the harbor office the day before to ask about the prize for climbing to the main truck, the one the harbor master had sent away with a flea in his ear. He was not cocky now. His face was white under the freckles, and he was carrying a tin cup, slopping, full of water from the scuttlebutt. He did not say anything. He knelt down on the deck beside the serpent woman, gently lifted her head with one hand, and held the cup to her broken mouth.

She drank. A little. The water ran down her chin and mixed with the blood and dripped onto the deck. She looked at the young sailor, and her gold eyes focused on him for the first time. She tried to say something, but nothing came out except a soft hiss. The young sailor said, “It’s all right. It’s all right. Just drink.” She drank a little more.

The harbor master watched this. Something in his chest twisted tighter, and he looked away.

And then the old habit came. The wall. The arms folded, the rules and the ledgers and the arrivals and the departures, the whole long patient forty-one-year work of standing firm against a disordered and dangerous world. It came up in him the way the tide comes in, and covered the shame over, and smoothed it flat, as the tide smooths the sand. He felt it come. He was grateful for it. He did not want to feel the shame. He did not know what to do with it. But he knew what to do with the wall. He had been doing it for forty-one years.

He cleared his throat.

“Serpent woman,” he said.

His voice came out low and gravelly and rolling, like a hull in a long swell. The whole deck went quiet to hear him. The crowd on the wharf went quiet too. It was the voice they all knew, the voice of the harbor master, the voice of the rule. They had heard it every day of their lives, and it had always made them feel, even when they hated it, that someone was in charge, that someone was keeping the wall.

The serpent woman turned her gold eyes from the young sailor to him.

“Serpent woman,” said Old Dunmoor Saltbeard again. He looked down at her from beneath the brim of his black oilskin hat, with his arms folded across the Chain of Harbor Office and his squinted eye fixed on her face. “The teeth of a serpent are for biting, not for hanging. The rope is for hands. Go home and use your hands, as the gods intended.” He paused. A gull on the rail beside him opened its beak and screamed. He looked at it, and the next thought came to him, as such thoughts do, with all the force and certainty of revelation. “Or at least,” he went on, “as the gulls intended. For the gulls have no hands, and do not hang from ropes. So you see.”

There was a long silence on the deck of the Prosperous Aunt.

The young sailor, kneeling with the cup, looked up at the harbor master with his mouth slightly open. Mister Larkspur, leaning on the rail, raised one iron-gray eyebrow. Quillimore Drabb, standing at the foot of the gangplank with his thin coat wrapped around him, closed his large wet eyes. On the wharf below, Merran turned to her uncle Brek and said in a low voice, “What did he say?” Her uncle Brek said, “Something about gulls.” Merran said, “But what did it mean?” Her uncle Brek shrugged.

Nobody knew what it meant. Nobody has ever known what it meant, to this day. The old women of Saltcoil still repeat it to their grandchildren, word for word, as the harbor master said it that morning. The grandchildren always ask, what does it mean, Grandmother? And the grandmothers always say, nobody knows, child. But that is what he said.

The harbor master did not wait to see whether anyone had understood. He was quite sure they had, for he understood it perfectly himself. It seemed to him, standing there on the deck in the cold gray light, the wisest thing he had ever said. It had a fine round sound to it, a weight, a dignity. It put the whole business in its proper place. Serpents were for biting, and ropes were for hands, and gulls were for whatever gulls were for. The world was as it should be, and the wall was standing. So you see.

He nodded once, as a man nods at a thing that is as it should be, and turned, and walked down the gangplank of the Prosperous Aunt. He walked through the crowd on the wharf, which parted before him in silence, and away up the central wharf toward his office. Quillimore Drabb fell in behind him without a word.

He walked with his arms folded and his head high, and he did not look back. He felt, as he walked, a great satisfaction. He had been right. He had said so. He had said so wisely and well, before the whole harbor, and there was an end of it. The serpent woman would not climb again. No one would let her. He would see to it himself. He would speak to Mister Larkspur about his articles; there might yet be a rule about articles that he had overlooked, and if there was not, he would make one. The wall would hold. The wall had held.

And yet.

Halfway up the central wharf, where the boards met the cobbles of Wharf Street, he stopped. Quillimore Drabb, behind him, very nearly walked into his back. The harbor master stood there a long moment in the cold, with his arms folded, looking at nothing.

He was thinking of the sound. Not the thud of her striking the deck, which had been loud and horrible and was already fading from his mind, as horrible things do. The other sound, the small one, the crack. A pot breaking in the next house. Something small and sharp and ordinary and final, which makes you look up from your supper and say, what was that? And he was thinking that he had looked up, and seen what it was, and gone back to his supper.

And he was thinking of the young sailor’s face, white under the freckles, as he knelt with the cup. The young sailor had not laughed. Or he had laughed, on the wharf, with everyone else, and then stopped laughing, and gone to get the cup. The harbor master had laughed too, and then stopped laughing, and given a speech about gulls.

“Sir?” said Quillimore Drabb softly.

“Clerk,” said the harbor master. His voice was not quite steady. “Clerk, I said a wise thing back there. Did I not?”

Quillimore Drabb considered this question for a long time. He had been clerk to the harbor master for nineteen years. In all that time he had never once told him a lie, nor once told him the truth when the truth would have been unkind. He did not intend to start now.

“You said a thing, sir,” he said at last. “Everyone heard it.”

The harbor master nodded slowly. Then he went on up Wharf Street to the bruise-blue door, and unlocked it, and went inside. He hung his storm coat on the third hook from the left and sat down on his high stool, folded his arms, and looked out of the small round window at the harbor.

He did not polish his buttons. He did not open the black ledger in the bottom drawer of his desk; there was no name to write in it, not today. The serpent woman was not dead. He told himself so several times. She was not dead, and so there was nothing for the black ledger, and so it was not on his head. And he had said a wise thing. He told himself that too.

He opened the green canvas Ledger of Arrivals to the page for the day, 8612a2.7.1. In the narrow margin at the very edge of the page, below where he had written nothing yet, he wrote in his small square upright hand:

Serpent woman. Fell from the main truck of the Prosperous Aunt. Not drowned. Not dead.

He looked at it. Then, after a while, smaller, so that no one else would see it, he added one more line:

I laughed.

He did not underline it. He blotted it, and closed the ledger, and folded his arms. He sat there all the rest of that cold gray morning at his window, looking out at the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt. The empty halyard swung at the top of it, back and forth, back and forth, and the gulls that had no hands wheeled and screamed above it. He was entirely certain, every moment, that he had said something wise.

• Segment 9: Sixty-Six Hours on the Wharf

Now you shall hear what happened after the serpent woman fell. Not to the harbor master, who went back to his office and wrote in his ledger and was sure he had been wise. Not to the sailors, who went back to their rigging and talked of it for a week and then of other things. You shall hear what happened to the serpent woman herself, and to an old grandmother who watched her, and to some other things besides. They were small, overlooked things, as the most important things in a story often are.

It began with a piece of tooth.

When the serpent woman’s right fang cracked at the top of the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt, with that small sharp sound like a pot breaking in the next house, a piece of it flew away. It was the tip, perhaps two inches long, curved and pale and smooth as the inside of a shell, broken off clean at the thick end. It went spinning off into the gray cold air of the morning, turning over and over, and fell a hundred and forty feet. Nobody saw where it went. Everybody was watching the serpent woman.

It landed on the wharf beside the Prosperous Aunt, between two boards, in a narrow crack where the wood had shrunk apart with age. It slid down into the crack and stuck there, its sharp end pointing up, its broken end wedged against a bent iron nail that had been lying in the same crack for nineteen years.

“Well,” said the bent nail, who had not had a visitor in a very long time. “And who are you?”

“I am a tooth,” said the piece of fang. “Or I was. I was part of a tooth. I was the very best part, the tip, the sharp part. I was going to be part of something wonderful.”

“What were you going to be?”

“I was going to hold,” said the piece of fang. “I was going to hold a whole serpent up in the air by a rope, high above everyone, while she spun and spun and they all looked up at her. And I did hold her. For a little while I held her. And then I broke.”

“Ah,” said the bent nail. He had once been part of a very fine ship, and had been pulled out of it by a careless carpenter and thrown down, and had lain in the crack ever since. “Yes. That happens. One is part of something, and then one is not. You will get used to it.”

“I do not want to get used to it,” said the piece of fang. “I want to go back.”

“Nobody goes back,” said the bent nail. “You will lie here in this crack with me, and the rain will come down, and the boots will go over, and in time you will be dust. That is what happens to the pieces of things.”

And the piece of fang was very sad, and lay in the crack with the nail beside it and the gray sky above it, and did not say anything more.

But that is not what happened, because that evening, when the crowds had gone and the wharf was empty, an old grandmother came along the boards with her crooked driftwood staff. She was going to the end of the farthest wharf to count the ships, as she always did. When she came to the place beside the Prosperous Aunt she stopped, and looked down, and clicked her beak.

“Ah,” she said. “There you are.”

She bent down, slowly, for her shell was heavy and her knees were old, and put her clever old claws into the crack and drew the piece of fang out. She held it up and looked at it in the last of the gray light. She turned it this way and that, and blew the dust off it. Then she wrapped it in a scrap of damp kelp from her shawl and put it into one of the pockets she kept there for such things.

“Not dust yet,” she said to it. “Not yet. Someone may want you.”

And the bent nail, left alone in the crack, said to himself: well, I never. Nineteen years, and nobody ever came for me.

So that is what became of the piece of tooth. Now you shall hear what became of the rest of her.

The serpent woman did not stay on the deck of the Prosperous Aunt for long. When the young sailor had given her the water, and the harbor master had made his speech about the gulls and gone away, and the crowd had begun to drift off by twos and threes, she moved. She did not stand, for she had nothing to stand on. She did not flow, as serpents flow, for her long body was too hurt to make the ripple run from head to tail. She dragged herself. Slowly, very slowly, with her arms pulling and her body dragging behind like a rope pulled through mud, she went down the gangplank of the Prosperous Aunt and along the inner wharf. People stepped out of her way and looked at her and looked away again. She went past the warehouses and the bollards and the heaps of nets, past the place where she had slept for a fortnight. She went all the way down to the end of the next wharf over from the grandmother’s own, to the old sea wall.

The old sea wall was made of great gray blocks of stone, each as big as a cart, laid one upon another long ago to hold back the winter storms. Its top was flat and broad and faced the west, so that it caught the warmth of Helios in the afternoons and held it long after the light had gone. It was where the serpent woman had always lain, before. Before she had a soul in her. Before she fell. All her life she had lain on that warm stone looking up at the masts.

She dragged herself up onto it. It took her a long time. Then she lay along the top of it, her long green body stretched out on the stones, her tail hanging down over the edge toward the water. And there she stayed.

She did not look up at the masts. That was the first thing the grandmother noticed, from her own piling at the end of the farthest wharf, where she could see the old sea wall quite clearly across a little stretch of water. The serpent woman had always looked up at the masts. Now she did not. She lay with her chin on her folded arms and her gold eyes open and looked straight out to sea, at the gray water and the gray sky and the place where they met. She did not move.

“She will go home now,” said the third piling. “She has had her fall. Now she will go home and be sensible.”

“She has no home,” said the old shell. “That wall is her home.”

“Then she will go to sleep,” said the third piling. “A fall like that, you sleep for a week.”

But she did not go to sleep. Her eyes stayed open all that evening while the grandmother counted the ships home. One, the Gull’s Daughter; two, Patch-Upon-Patch; three, the Three Aunts. On through all thirty, and then thirty-one, the Bright Morrow, which was not there. And then the grandmother looked across the water at the old sea wall and said, softly, “Thirty-two.” Click. “Still here.”

Now you must understand about the days in Saṃsāra, for it matters to this story. In other worlds, they say, a day is longer: twenty-four hours, some of the new ones remember, from the rising of the sun to its rising again. But in Saṃsāra a day is only twenty-two hours from Helios up to Helios up. So three days and three nights is sixty-six hours, not seventy-two. The grandmother had worked it out on her beads long ago, for she liked to know such things exactly. Sixty-six hours. That is how long the serpent woman lay on the old sea wall and looked at the sea.

The first night was cold. It was the first night of the week of Darkness, and the week of Darkness is always cold, for the great banded world VaporSphere passes before the face of Helios in the middle of each of those days and takes the warmth away with it. The stones of the old sea wall, which had been warm in the afternoon, grew cold as the night came down, and then colder, until frost came on them in a thin gray rime. The serpent woman lay on the frosted stone and did not move. The grandmother, on her piling, watched.

Now, serpents do not like the cold. Everybody knows this. Their blood is not warm of itself, like a bear’s or a gull’s. It is warm only when the world is warm, and when the world is cold their blood goes slow and thick, and they go slow and thick with it. A serpent left out on a frosty stone all night may not wake in the morning. The grandmother knew this. She sat on her piling with her old eyes fixed on the long green shape on the wall across the water, and her old heart ached.

“Go to her,” said the old shell.

“Not yet,” said the grandmother.

“She will freeze.”

“She will not freeze,” said the grandmother. “She is stubborn. Stubborn things do not freeze. Look at you, you old thing. You have been out on that piling a hundred winters.”

“I am a shell,” said the old shell. “I have no blood to go slow.”

“And she has a great deal of stubbornness,” said the grandmother, “which is better than blood, on a cold night.” Click.

But all the same, she did not go home that night. She sat on her piling until the lamps went out one by one in the windows of the city behind her and the sky was black and full of cold stars. She sat there all night, wrapped in her damp kelp shawl, watching the old sea wall. And when the cold grew worst, in the dead middle of the night, she did a small thing that nobody noticed.

She leaned back against the old shell on the piling beside her and closed her eyes. And the moss on her own shell began, very softly, to glow.

It was not a bright glow. It was a soft sea-green light, like the light of the sea when the sun is in it, like the faint glow of certain small creatures in the shallows on summer nights. It came up out of the moss on her old domed shell and spread a little way around her into the dark, so that the end of the farthest wharf, with its twelve old pilings and its tired ropes and its old horn-shell on its iron straps, was lit up softly green against the black water. It was a light that could be seen a long way across water. It was a light for lost things to steer by.

Across the little stretch of water, on the old sea wall, the serpent woman turned her head.

She looked at the light. The grandmother, with her eyes closed, could not see her look. But she felt it, the way you can always feel it when someone is looking at you in the dark. The serpent woman lay on the frosted stone and looked at the soft green glow at the end of the farthest wharf, and did not look away. Her gold eyes, which had been fixed on the gray nothing of the sea all evening, were fixed now on something else, something small and warm and near.

The grandmother smiled, as much as a beak can smile, and kept her eyes closed, and let the moss glow until Helios came up.

“You did that for her,” said the old shell, in the gray of the morning.

“I did it for me,” said the grandmother. “I was cold.” Click.

The old shell did not believe her. But it said nothing, for it had been empty a long time, and it knew when to say nothing.

On the morning of the second day, the serpent woman was still alive.

She had not moved in the night. Frost lay white along her back, and her scales had gone dull and dark with the cold. But when Helios climbed out of the sea like a wet dog, as it does, and its pale light came across the water and touched the old sea wall, she blinked. She shook a little, all along her length, so that the frost fell from her in a fine glittering powder. And she turned her face from the green glow, which had gone out now with the dawn, back to the sea.

And by her head, on the stone, there was a fish.

It was a small silver fish, one of the good ones, wrapped neatly in a strip of damp green kelp. It was laid just at the edge of the stone where her chin rested, so that it was the first thing she would see when she looked down. Nobody saw who had left it. The grandmother, on her piling across the water, was looking very hard at a gull.

The serpent woman did not eat it.

She looked at it. The grandmother saw her look at it, and then look away, back out to sea, and not look at it again. And her heart, which had been glad all through the gray dawn, went heavy in her chest like a stone dropped in a bucket.

“She will not eat,” said the fourth piling. “She has given up.”

“She has not given up,” said the grandmother sharply. “She is thinking. Some people cannot eat and think at the same time. I knew a man once who did not eat for nine days because he was thinking about a woman, and on the tenth day he married her, and they had eleven children, and I counted every one.” Click.

“Then why will she not eat?”

The grandmother did not answer at once. She was looking at the serpent woman’s mouth. Even from across the water she could see it: the right fang broken off short, jagged, dark at the root where it had bled; the left fang with a fine dark line running down its whole length. She was thinking about what it would mean to swallow a fish whole, head first, the way serpents do, with a mouth like that. She was thinking that perhaps the serpent woman could not eat, not that she would not.

She was thinking, too, about something else. She did not say it to the pilings or the shell or anyone. She was thinking that the serpent woman was not looking at the masts. The serpent woman had always looked at the masts. Every day of her life, before the soul came, and every day since, she had looked up at the masts. Now she lay on the old sea wall and looked only at the sea, and the grandmother did not know whether that was a good thing or a very bad one.

All that second day people came to look at her.

They did not come close. They came along the next wharf in ones and twos and stood at a little distance and looked. Then they went away again, shaking their heads. The dockhands came, and the fishwives. Merran came, the big freckled lizard-folk woman from the Gull’s Daughter, and stood a long while with her arms crossed and her wide jaw set. Then she went away and came back with a heavy old wool blanket that smelled of fish and pipe smoke, and laid it over the serpent woman’s back, and went away again without a word. The gap-toothed girl from the tavern came at noon with a bowl of fish stew. She set it on the stone beside the untouched fish and stood there wringing her hands in her apron and said, “Oh, love. Oh, you poor love. Please eat something,” and went away crying a little. Children came and stared and were pulled away by their mothers. A cat came, a thin ginger thing with a torn ear. It sniffed at the fish in its kelp wrapping and looked at the serpent woman and decided, for reasons of its own, to leave the fish alone, and went off.

And the young sailor came. The cocky, freckle-faced, sunburnt youth from the Prosperous Aunt, who had brought her the cup of water on the deck. He was not cocky any more. He came in the afternoon, when his watch was done, and sat down on the stones of the old sea wall a little way from her, with his knees drawn up and his arms around them. He sat there an hour and said nothing at all. Then he got up and went away, and came back in the evening and sat there another hour. The grandmother, watching from her piling, liked him very much for that.

“He is sorry,” said the old shell.

“He is sorry,” agreed the grandmother. “He laughed, and now he is sorry. That is the best kind of sorry. The other kind is sorry without ever having laughed, and it is not worth much.”

And in the evening, as Helios was going down red behind the city in the clouds, which had drifted away to the far west and was only a soft gold smudge on the edge of the sky, the harbor master came.

The grandmother saw him coming down the next wharf from a long way off, for there is no mistaking Old Dunmoor Saltbeard: the broad short shape of him, the black oilskin hat, the white beard braided in its three salt-crusted ropes, the brass buttons catching the last of the light. He came slowly, which was not like him. He came with his arms folded, which was very like him. When he reached the old sea wall he stopped, a little way off, as the others had, and stood looking at the serpent woman.

She did not look at him. She was looking at the sea.

He stood there a long time. The grandmother watched him. She saw him unfold his arms. That was a thing she had not seen him do in public for many years. She saw him open his mouth, as if to speak. She saw him stand like that, with his arms hanging at his sides and his mouth open, a long time. She saw him close his mouth again, and fold his arms, and turn, and walk away, back up the next wharf toward the city, very slowly, without once looking back.

“What was that?” said the third piling. “What did he come for? He did not say anything.”

“He came to say something,” said the grandmother. “And then he found he did not know how.” She watched the harbor master go up the wharf until he was lost among the warehouses and the lamps. “He is a good man. He just does not know it yet. Give him a storm or two.” Click.

The second night was colder than the first. The serpent woman lay on the old sea wall under Merran’s fishy blanket, with the cold fish stew and the untouched fish beside her on the stone, and looked at the sea. The grandmother sat on her piling and let the moss on her shell glow green all night, and the serpent woman looked at it, and the grandmother pretended not to know.

“Go to her,” said the old shell, in the dead middle of the night. “She has been there two days. Go now.”

“Not yet,” said the grandmother.

“Why not? You know what she needs. You have known since the morning she fell. Why do you wait?”

The grandmother was quiet for a long while. The moss on her shell glowed, and the cold stars burned, and across the water the serpent woman’s gold eyes shone faintly in the green light.

“Because everything good comes in threes,” she said at last. “Three wishes. Three sisters. Three brothers. Three trials. Three days and three nights. You do not go to someone on the first day, when they are still falling. You do not go to them on the second day, when they are still lying where they fell. You go to them on the third day, when they have begun to look for something. Then they are ready to hear.” She clicked her beak. “Besides,” she said, and there was something in her voice that might, in a younger grandmother, have been a giggle, “it is a much better story this way.”

The old shell sighed through its long whorled throat, a low hollow sound like wind in a cave. “You are a terrible old woman,” it said.

“I am a grandmother,” said the grandmother. “It is the same thing.” Click.

On the morning of the third day, there was another fish beside the serpent woman’s head on the stone: small, silver, wrapped neatly in damp green kelp.

And the serpent woman ate it.

The grandmother saw it happen. She saw the serpent woman look at the fish a long while in the gray dawn light. She saw her reach out with one hand, slowly, and unwrap the kelp and take the fish. She did not swallow it whole, as she had swallowed the herring her first night in Saltcoil. She could not, with her mouth like that. She tore it into small pieces with her claws, very carefully, and put each piece into her mouth on the left side, away from the broken fang, and swallowed it, and winced. It took her a very long time. It must have hurt a great deal. But she ate the whole fish, every piece of it, and then she reached for the cold fish stew in its bowl and drank that too, slowly, wincing, all of it.

The grandmother let out a breath she had not known she was holding.

“There,” she said. “There.”

And something else had changed, too. The grandmother saw it as the morning went on. The serpent woman was still looking at the sea. But she was not looking at the gray nothing where the sea met the sky, as she had been for two days. She was looking at something nearer. Her gold eyes moved over the water slowly, searching, as they had searched the wharf in the first days of her forgetting sickness. They moved over the harbor and the breakwater and the long line of the reef beyond it, where the water broke white over the coral even on the calmest days. She was looking for something. She did not know what. But she was looking.

“Now?” said the old shell.

“Tonight,” said the grandmother. “Tonight. On the third night.”

The third day passed. It was the day of Abjursday, the third of the week of Darkness. At noon VaporSphere came across the face of Helios and the cold came down, and the whole harbor went dim and gray as the inside of a shell. The serpent woman lay on her wall under Merran’s blanket and looked at the reef. The young sailor came and sat beside her, an hour in the afternoon and an hour in the evening, and said nothing. The grandmother counted the ships home: one, two, three, all of them, thirty, and the Bright Morrow, which was not there. Then she looked across the water at the old sea wall and said softly, “Thirty-two.” Click. “Still looking.”

And when the lamps of the city had all gone out but a few, and the last of the sailors had gone home from the taverns, and the cold stars were burning bright over the black harbor, the grandmother got up from her piling.

She did it slowly, for her shell was heavy and her knees were old and she had been sitting a very long time. She took up her crooked driftwood staff. She walked back along the farthest wharf, past the twelve old pilings and the tired ropes, which did not sigh as she went by. She crossed over at the landward end and came down the next wharf, step by slow step, to the old sea wall. There she climbed up onto the stone, which was not easy for an old shellback, and sat down beside the serpent woman. Not very close; a little way off, the way the young sailor had sat. She leaned her staff against the stone and folded her flipper-hands in her lap.

The serpent woman did not look at her. She was looking at the reef.

They sat like that a long time. The water lapped at the foot of the old sea wall. Far out past the breakwater, the reef broke white in the dark, a long pale line of foam glimmering faintly under the stars. The cold came down. The grandmother could see the serpent woman shivering under Merran’s blanket, a fine trembling all along her length, like a plucked rope.

So the grandmother unwound her old kelp shawl from her shell. It was damp and never dripped and smelled of brine. She leaned over and laid it gently across the serpent woman’s shoulders, over the blanket, and tucked it in at the neck with her clever old claws.

The serpent woman stopped shivering.

It did not happen slowly. It happened all at once, as if a cold hand had let go of her. Her long body went still under the blanket and the shawl, and the fine trembling stopped, and she let out a breath, a long one, all the way from the bottom of her long chest. And she turned her head, at last, and looked at the grandmother.

Her gold eyes were very tired. They were not searching any more, the way they had searched in the forgetting sickness. They knew themselves now; the grandmother could see that. They knew who they were and where they had come from and what they had lost. And they were sadder than any eyes the grandmother had seen in a long, long while.

“Who are you?” said the serpent woman. Her voice was soft and blurred and strange, with the long hiss in it, and something else too, a catch, a whistle. It was the broken fang, the grandmother thought, getting in the way of the softer sounds. It would take her a while to learn to speak around it.

“An old woman,” said the grandmother. “A grandmother. I count the ships.”

“You left the fish,” said the serpent woman. “Every morning. Didn’t you?”

“Fish,” said the grandmother, and clicked her beak, and said nothing else.

The serpent woman looked at her a long moment. Then something happened at the corner of her broken mouth that might, on a better day, have been the beginning of a smile.

They sat a while longer. The reef broke white in the dark. A gull, very late, flew over them, crying, and was gone.

“I fell,” said the serpent woman at last, very quietly.

“I know,” said the grandmother.

“I was so close. I was there. I was up there, at the top, and I was spinning, and I was…” Her voice broke. “And then my tooth. My tooth broke. And I fell. And now…” She put one hand up to her mouth, slowly, and touched the jagged stump of the right fang, and the long dark crack in the left one, and winced. “The teeth go first,” she said. “My mother told me that. In the other life. The teeth go first. And I thought, here, in this body, I have new teeth, strong teeth, better than any teeth she ever had. And they broke. They broke the very first time. They are not strong enough. They will never be strong enough. And I cannot…” She stopped. She did not finish. She put her hand down and looked out at the reef again.

The grandmother looked at her a long while.

She could have said a great many things then. She could have told the serpent woman everything she knew, and she knew a great deal. She knew things that nobody in Saltcoil knew, or nearly nobody. She could have told her plainly and simply where to go and what she would find there and what she must do, and spared her a great deal of trouble.

But she did not. She did not want to. Grandmothers in stories never do, and a very good thing too. A thing that is handed to you plainly is a thing you hold carelessly, and a thing you have to go and find for yourself is a thing you hold forever. She knew this. She had always known it. And besides, though she would never have said so, it was such fun not to.

So she said only this:

“Child of the scales,” she said, in her soft blurred toothless voice, with the beak clicking between the words. “Child of the scales. If your teeth are too weak, then you must find stronger teeth to wear over your teeth. As a foot that is too soft wears a shoe.”

The serpent woman turned and stared at her.

“A shoe,” she said. “For the teeth.”

“For the teeth,” said the grandmother.

“Where…” The serpent woman’s gold eyes had changed. They were not sad any more, or not only sad. They were wide, and bright, and searching again, but not in the old lost way of the forgetting sickness. They were searching the way a sailor searches the horizon for land. “Where is there such a shoe for the teeth?”

The grandmother took up her crooked driftwood staff. She held it loosely, the way she always held it when she wanted it to point the way, and its tip turned of its own accord, slowly, out toward the sea. She lifted it and pointed past the harbor and the breakwater, to the long line of the reef where the water broke white in the dark.

“Out there,” she said, “lives the Reef Viper, who is older than this city. Each year she sheds the shoes of her fangs, as all vipers do, and leaves them in the coral. They are harder than stone and smoother than the inside of a shell.”

She let the staff drop, and leaned on it.

“But the Reef Viper,” she said, “does not give anything for nothing. She will ask a price.”

The serpent woman stared out at the reef. Then she stared at the grandmother. Then at the reef again. Her long body under the blanket and the shawl had gone tight and still, every scale of her, like a rope taking up a weight.

“What price?” she said.

And the grandmother looked at her with her milky old eyes. Inside her something warm and wicked and very fond rose up like bubbles in a pot, so that she had to click her beak twice to keep from laughing aloud.

“A price,” said the grandmother.

And she got up from the old sea wall, slowly, as old women do, with her staff and her heavy mossy shell and her creaking knees. She left her kelp shawl where it was, around the serpent woman’s shoulders. She climbed down off the stone and went away up the next wharf, step by slow step, into the dark, without another word. She did not look back once. Grandmothers in stories do not explain themselves. This is well known.

Behind her, on the old sea wall, the serpent woman sat bolt upright under Merran’s blanket and the old woman’s shawl. She stared out at the reef where the water broke white, and did not lie down again all night.

The grandmother walked back to the end of the farthest wharf, slowly, past the tired ropes and the twelve old pilings. When she reached her own piling she did not sit down on it. Instead she went to the very edge of the boards, where the wharf stopped and the sea began, and took from her bucket one more small silver fish, and held it a moment in her flipper-hand. Then she leaned out over the black water and let it drop.

It fell with a small plop and was gone.

“Tomorrow,” the grandmother said softly to the place where it had fallen. “She will come tomorrow. Be kind to her, old thing. Or at least be fair.”

Far below, too far for any eye to see, something very large and very old coiled around a black rock turned its attention up toward the place where the fish had fallen, and held it there.

“You told her,” said the old shell from its iron straps on the piling beside her. “You told her it was coming.”

“I told her nothing,” said the grandmother. “I told a fish.” Click.

And she sat down at last on her worn piling at the very end of the farthest wharf in Saltcoil, shivering a little without her shawl, and laughed quietly to herself in the dark. She laughed the way old women laugh when they have done something they are pleased with and do not intend to tell anyone about. The moss on her shell glowed soft and green. The pilings creaked. The ropes lay quiet.

And across the little stretch of black water, on the old sea wall, a serpent woman with a broken tooth sat looking out at the reef where the water broke white, all night long, and waited for Helios to rise.

• Segment 10: What the Fishermen Tell the Fish

Of the Chain

It is commonly supposed by the dry ones that the sea is silent.

They stand on their wharves and look out over the water and see only its face: the gray chop, the white seams of current, the long slow swell. They hear only the slap of it against their pilings and the hiss of it on their beaches. They say to one another, how quiet the sea is, how peaceful, how deep and still, as if the whole of the great water were a sleeper whose sleep they must not disturb. They are wrong. The sea is the most talkative thing in the world. It never stops talking. It talks all day and all night, in every one of its depths, in a thousand voices, and it has never once in all the ages of the world held its tongue about anything.

It is only that the dry ones do not listen.

We listen. We have always listened. It is nearly the only thing we do, coiled here around our black rock in the deep below Saltcoil. We listen as a spider listens to its web, feeling for the small tremblings that pass along it from the far edges, and we have learned the threads of our web as a ropemaker learns the strands of his rope. There is a chain to the talk of the sea, as there is to all talk. Things are said, and passed on, and said again, and passed on again, from one mouth to the next, down and down through the water, until at last they come to us. And so it was that we learned, over three days, what had happened to the serpent woman on the old sea wall.

The chain begins, as all chains of talk in a harbor begin, with the fishermen.

Consider the fisherman. He is a creature of great solitude who cannot bear to be alone. He goes out before Helios is up in his small boat, patched and patched again. He sits alone all day on the gray water with his lines out and his nets down, hour upon hour, with no one to speak to but the gulls, who do not answer, and his own thoughts, which answer too much. So he talks. He talks to himself. He talks to his boat. He talks to the fish, leaning over the side with his elbows on the gunwale and his pipe in his mouth. He tells them everything that has happened on the wharf: the prices at the market, the quarrels in the taverns, the new ones who have fallen from the sky and the old ones who have died. He tells them what he had for breakfast and what his wife said to him and what he would like to say to the harbor master. He does not think the fish are listening. He would be astonished to learn that they are.

But they are. Everything a fisherman says over the side goes down into the water like a dropped stone. It sinks, spreading as it goes, and the fish below hear it. They do not understand all of it, for the speech of the dry ones is clumsy and full of words that mean nothing in the sea: tavern, harbor master, breakfast. But they understand enough. And what they understand, they tell.

The fish tell the eels.

The eels tell the crabs, and the crabs the octopus who lives in the wreck of the old brig Saltbird on the north side of the reef. The octopus tells the great grouper who keeps his court under the overhang of the eastern ledge. The grouper tells the cleaner shrimp who pick his teeth, and the cleaner shrimp tell everyone, for they are the gossips of the deep and visit every great mouth in the reef. And at the end of it all, down at the bottom of the chain, coiled around the black rock in the dark, there is us.

And there is the grandmother.

We must say something of the grandmother, though we will not say much. Some things belong to her, and we do not give away what is not ours. The grandmother talks to everyone. She talks to the fishermen and the fishwives and the dockhands and the children. She talks to the pilings and the ropes and the old horn-shell on its iron straps. She talks to the fish, as the fishermen do, but not as the fishermen do; for when she talks to the fish, she knows that they are listening. And sometimes, of an evening, at the very end of the farthest wharf, she drops a small silver fish into the water.

It falls through the green and the gray and the deep blue dark, turning, all the way down, until it comes to rest on the sand beside our rock. And we know, when we see it, that the grandmother has said something. We do not always know what. But we know that it is meant for us.

We have known the grandmother a long time. Longer than she would admit, if anyone asked her, which nobody does. We will not say how long. We will not say how we came to know her. There are fishermen in Saltcoil who say, when they are deep in their cups, that the grandmother is the fish. When the other fishermen laugh, they say no, no, I mean it, I saw something once. And then they stop and will not say what they saw. We do not correct them. We do not confirm them. It is not our affair.

So. That is the chain. Fishermen to fish, fish to eels, eels to crabs, crabs to the octopus, the octopus to the grouper, the grouper to the shrimp, the shrimp to everyone. And beside it, apart from it, quietly, a small silver fish falling through the dark.

Of Rumor in Water

It may be asked how much of what comes down the chain is true. The answer, which we give after many lifetimes of listening, is this: all of it, and none of it, and the art lies in knowing which is which.

For rumor in water is not like rumor in air. In air, we are told, a thing said passes from mouth to ear quickly and cleanly, like a ball thrown from one hand to another. It may be dropped or fumbled, but on the whole it arrives in the same shape in which it set out. In water it is otherwise. Sound carries far in water, much farther than in air; a whale may hear another whale across a hundred miles of open ocean. But it carries strangely. It bends. It echoes off the ledges and the wrecks and the hulls. It sinks into the cold layers and rises from the warm ones, and it arrives at the end of its journey changed, sometimes beyond recognition, the way a face is changed when you look at it through a wave.

And every link of the chain changes it further, after its own fashion.

The herring change it by speed. They are the swiftest of the talkers and the least careful. A herring hears something and is off with it before it has finished being said. It passes the thing on half-heard to the next herring, who passes it on quarter-heard to the next. By the time a rumor has gone through a shoal of herring it has been worn as smooth as a pebble in a stream. It is still the same stone. But all its edges and particulars have been rubbed away, and it says only something happened, something big, on the wharf.

The eels change it by malice. They are sly, the eels, and they love a cruel story above all things. Whatever they hear, they make it worse. If a dry one stubs his toe, the eels say he broke his leg. If he broke his leg, they say he died. And yet the eels are, in their way, the most accurate of all the talkers. Their malice makes them attentive. They remember every detail, the better to twist it. If you can strip away the cruelty, you find underneath a story that is very nearly true.

The crabs change it by being literal. A crab hears a thing and repeats it exactly as he heard it, word for word, in the order in which the words were said, without the least notion of what any of it means. A crab will tell you, with the gravest face in the world, that the harbor master said the gulls had no hands. And he will not be able to tell you why the harbor master should have said such a thing, or whether it was important, or what it had to do with anything. He will only repeat it, and repeat it again, and click his claws, until you swim away.

The octopus changes it by cleverness. She is the wisest creature on the reef, after ourselves, and she knows it. She cannot pass on a story without improving it. She adds a little here, trims a little there, finds the meaning in it that the teller missed, and draws out the moral. The story she gives you is always better than the one she was given. It is also always somewhat less true.

The grouper changes it by importance. He is old and vast and pompous and believes himself the lord of the eastern ledge, which in a sense he is. Whatever he hears, he makes into a matter of state. A sailor falls from a mast, and he tells you that the order of the world is threatened, that the dry ones are in turmoil, that grave events are afoot.

And the shrimp change it by repetition. They tell everyone, and everyone tells them back, and the story goes round and round among them until it has been told a hundred times in a hundred mouths and has become something else entirely: a kind of song, a kind of legend, a thing the whole reef knows without anyone remembering where it came from.

So the art of listening, which we have practiced for eight lives on this rock, is the art of sifting. One takes the herring’s pebble and the eel’s cruelty and the crab’s exact words and the octopus’s moral and the grouper’s grandeur and the shrimp’s song, and lays them all side by side, as a jeweler lays out stones on a cloth. One looks at each and asks what it has added and what it has taken away, and what lies beneath all of them that none of them has touched. Then one sets them all aside and listens for the small silver fish.

Of the Thud

But the first news we had of the serpent woman did not come down the chain at all. It came through the hull.

On the morning of Conjursday, the first day of the week of Darkness, in the gray cold before full light, we were lying coiled around the black rock, half asleep. The cold of the week of Darkness was in the water and had made us slow. We felt a thing we had never felt before in all our lives.

It came through the water from the inner harbor. It was not a sound exactly, though it had something of a sound in it. It was a shock, a single heavy blow, like the blow of a great hammer on a great anvil. It had come down through the oak deck of a ship and through her ribs and keel and planking and out into the water around her. From there it had spread in every direction through the harbor, as a ring spreads on a pond when a stone is dropped, until it reached us, coiled around our rock in the deep. We felt it on our scales. We felt it in our bones. We felt it in our fangs.

It was a body. We knew it at once. We have felt many things strike many hulls in our long lives: anchors, cargo, cannon fire, the keels of other ships. We know the difference between a falling crate and a falling body as a physician knows the difference between a cough and a death rattle. Something alive had fallen a very long way and struck a deck. And it was a long body, a long heavy body, the length of a serpent.

We uncoiled from our rock. We did not mean to. Our body did it without asking us, as a sleeper’s hand jerks when he dreams of falling. We lay a long moment half off the rock, with our head raised and our tongue tasting the water and every scale along the whole ninety feet of us standing on end. We listened.

There was nothing more. Only the ordinary sounds of the harbor in the morning: the creak of hulls, the slap of water on pilings, the far thin cries of the gulls. And then, after a while, very faint, the sound of laughter. Many voices, laughing, high and strange and uncertain, coming down through the water from the inner wharves.

We coiled ourselves back around our rock. We told ourselves that it was not our affair. Bodies fall from masts; the dry ones are always falling from things. We had watched them fall for eight lifetimes, and had never once uncoiled from our rock on their account. We told ourselves this several times. Our scales did not lie down.

And all that day, as the cold came down and the eclipse passed over and the light went gray and dim, we waited for the chain.

Of What the Chain Said

The herring brought it first, as they always do.

They came flashing down through the gray water in the early afternoon, a whole shoal of them, silver and shrill and wild with it. Something happened, they cried, something happened on the wharf, something big, something big, a serpent, a mast, a fall, a fall, something happened. And they were gone, flashing away to the west with the current, to tell it to the next reef, and the next, worn smoother at every telling.

The eels came next, at dusk. They slid out of their holes in the ledge above our rock, three of them, long and gray and grinning. They hung in the water before our face, swaying, and told it with relish.

“A serpent,” said the first eel. “A serpent woman of the dry ones. She climbed the tallest mast in the harbor, the very tallest, all the way to the top. And the dry ones laughed at her. All of them laughed. They laughed and laughed and laughed.”

“And she bit the rope,” said the second eel, “at the very top. Bit it with her teeth, like a fish on a hook, and let go, and hung there by her teeth, a hundred and forty feet up, with nothing beneath her.”

“And her tooth broke,” said the third eel, and grinned wider than the other two. “Snapped clean off. Crack. And down she came. Down and down and down. And struck the deck. And broke. Broke all over. Broke like a dropped pot. And the dry ones laughed again.”

“She is dead,” said the first eel.

“She is dying,” said the second.

“She will be dead by morning,” said the third.

And they slid back into their holes in the ledge, laughing to themselves, and were gone.

We lay coiled around our rock and did not move for a long time.

We knew the eels. We knew their cruelty. We knew that a stubbed toe in an eel’s mouth is a broken leg and a broken leg is a death. And we knew, too, that beneath their cruelty there is usually something very nearly true. So we laid it out on the cloth, as a jeweler lays out stones, and looked at it. A serpent woman. The tallest mast. The dry ones laughing. A rope, bitten. A hanging by the teeth. A broken tooth. A fall. A deck.

A serpent woman, hanging by her teeth from the top of a mast.

We did not sleep that night.

The crabs came in the morning. There were two of them, old gray crabs from under the central wharf, who had heard it from a younger crab who had heard it from the eels. They stood on the sand before our rock with their eyes on their stalks and their claws clicking. They repeated, word for word, in the order in which the words had been said, everything that had been said on the deck of the Prosperous Aunt after the serpent woman fell.

“The harbor master said: Serpent woman,” said the first crab.

“The harbor master said: The teeth of a serpent are for biting, not for hanging,” said the second crab.

“The harbor master said: The rope is for hands,” said the first crab.

“The harbor master said: Go home and use your hands, as the gods intended,” said the second crab.

“The harbor master said: Or at least as the gulls intended,” said the first crab.

“The harbor master said: For the gulls have no hands, and do not hang from ropes,” said the second crab.

“The harbor master said: So you see,” said both crabs together, and clicked their claws, and looked at us expectantly.

We looked at them a long time.

“What does it mean?” we asked at last.

“We do not know,” said the first crab.

“It is what he said,” said the second.

And they turned and scuttled away sideways across the sand, still repeating it to each other as they went: the gulls have no hands, the gulls have no hands, so you see.

We did not know what it meant either. We confess it. We have thought about it a great deal since, in the long dark, and we have come to the conclusion that it did not mean anything at all. Sometimes a dry one, when he has seen something he does not understand and does not wish to feel, will say a great many words in a very firm voice so as not to have to feel it. The words do not need to mean anything. They need only to be firm. We have done the same ourselves, in our time, though our words were teeth.

But one thing in the crabs’ long recital we did understand, and it was the most important thing of all. The harbor master had spoken to her. He had said serpent woman, and go home, and so you see. One does not say go home to the dead.

She was alive.

The octopus came at noon on the second day, as the eclipse passed over and the cold came down. She came slowly, flowing over the ledges like spilled ink, changing color as she went, and settled herself on the sand before our rock with her eight arms folded under her. She looked at us out of her strange square-pupiled eyes, which see more than most eyes, and told it her own way.

“She lives,” said the octopus. “She lies on the old sea wall, at the end of the next wharf to the grandmother’s. She lies there and looks at the sea. She does not eat. She does not sleep. She does not move. She has a broken tooth and a broken heart, and she looks at the sea, and she does not look at the masts. She has always looked at the masts. Now she does not.” The octopus shifted her arms. “The dry ones come to look at her. One of them brought her a blanket. One brought her stew. A young sailor sits with her and does not speak. The harbor master came and stood before her and opened his mouth and closed it and went away.” She paused, and her colors rippled, gray to blue to a deep thoughtful violet. “I think,” she said, “that she is a creature who wished very badly to be up there, and who has learned that she cannot, and does not know what to do now that she knows it. And I think that is the saddest thing a creature can learn. And I think you know it better than any creature on this reef.”

She flowed away again over the ledges, changing color as she went, and left us alone.

The grouper came that evening, vast and slow and pompous. He told us that grave events were afoot among the dry ones, that a serpent had defied the natural order by climbing where serpents should not climb, that the natural order had struck her down, and that this was as it should be. We let him speak and did not answer, and at length he swam away, offended.

And the shrimp came all that night and all the next day, in their dozens and their hundreds, flitting and darting and telling it to one another and back again. By then it was no longer a story at all. It was a song. The serpent who hung by her teeth, they sang, the serpent who climbed to the top of the sky, the serpent who bit the rope and fell. The whole reef was singing it. In a week, we knew, it would be a legend. In a year, nobody would remember it had ever really happened.

We lay coiled around our rock and listened to them sing.

Of Hopes Before

And now we must confess a thing. We have confessed many things already in this long account, our deaths and our killings and our homesickness for the sky. But this is the hardest, and we have put it off as long as we could.

We were afraid to hope.

For we had hoped before. We are not young. We have lived eight lives on this rock. Three times in those lives, three times only, there had been someone, some dry one, who promised, or seemed to promise, to show us the sky.

The first was in the fourth life, the life before the storm of magic. A diver came down to our reef, a young man of the dry ones, holding his breath, with a knife at his belt, looking for pearls. He saw us, and was afraid, and we did not kill him; we were tired of killing, even then, though we did not yet know it. He came back the next day, and the next. He was a brave fool, and he talked to us, as the fishermen talk to the fish. He told us of the land and the sky and the hills. When we asked him, with our slow deep voice that frightened him so, what the sky looked like from above, he laughed and said that one day he would climb the highest hill on Lapita and tell us. Then he went up, and never came down again. The chain told us, a month later, that he had drowned in a storm off the eastern point, far from our reef. We never knew whether he had climbed the hill.

The second was in the sixth life, the life of the anchor. A bird-folk, a young gull-woman with bright eyes, used to land on the masts of the ships moored over our rock and call down to us through the water. She was curious about the deep, as we were curious about the sky. We made a game of it, she and we. She told us the colors of the clouds, and we told her the colors of the coral, and neither of us could quite imagine what the other meant. She promised that one day she would fly so high that she could see the whole of Lapita at once, and come back and tell us what it looked like. She flew away one morning in the season of Blooming, very high, very far, and did not come back. The chain never told us what became of her. We have wondered, since, whether she reached the place where she could see the whole island at once, and liked it so much that she stayed.

The third was in the seventh life, the life of age. A mage came down to us in a bubble of air, an old man with a long beard, and offered us a bargain. He would lift us into the sky in one of the great floating bowls of the city in the clouds, so that we could see it with our own eyes, from above, at last. In exchange he wanted the crystal from our skull when we died. We were old by then, very old, and near our end. We thought: it is a fair price, for I will not need the crystal, and I will have seen the sky. We agreed. He went away to prepare the bowl. He was gone a month, and then a year, and then we died, as we have told, of age, on our rock, on an evening in the week of Blooming, with fishermen singing above. He never came back. Perhaps he forgot. Perhaps he failed. Perhaps he missed a day in the casting of his float spell and had to begin again, and was still beginning again when we died. We do not know. We know only that we died without seeing the sky, and that the last thing we thought, before the dark, was: he did not come.

Three hopes. Three disappointments. And each one, when it came, was worse than the one before, for each time we had let ourselves hope a little more.

So we did not wish to hope again. We had learned. We had made a rule for ourselves in the long years of the eighth life, as the harbor master had made his rule. Our rule was this: we will watch the dry ones, as one watches clouds, and we will want nothing from them, and so we will never be disappointed again. It was a good rule. It had served us well. It was a wall, like the harbor master’s folded arms, and behind it we had been, if not happy, then at least quiet.

And now the wall was cracking. We could feel it.

For here was a serpent woman. A serpent, like us, born on the sand of the lower beach, who had lain her whole life on a warm stone looking up at the masts, as we lay our whole life on a cold rock looking up at the hulls. A soul had fallen into her out of the sky, and she had climbed. A serpent with no hands and no feet, of a kind that ought never to have been able to climb, had climbed to the very top of the tallest mast in the harbor. She had bitten the rope, let go, and hung there by her teeth, a hundred and forty feet above the deck, spinning, with the whole harbor below her. She had been up there, where we have never been and never can be, and she had seen.

What had she seen? That was the question that would not let us sleep. What had she seen, in those few moments at the top of the mast, before her tooth broke? Had she looked down? Had she seen the harbor and the boats and the reef, and the long white line where the water breaks over the coral, and the dark place in the deep where we lie? Had she seen the sky from above?

And would she go up again?

That was the other question, and it was worse. For the octopus had said she lay on the old sea wall and did not look at the masts. The octopus had said she had learned that she could not. And we knew, better than any creature on the reef, what it is to learn that one cannot. We knew how that learning settles into one’s bones and stays there, life after life after life.

Of the Fish

On the evening of the third day, Abjursday, a small silver fish came down through the dark.

It fell slowly, turning as it came, its scales catching what little light there was. It came to rest on the sand beside our rock in the same place where all the grandmother’s fish had come to rest, over the years. We looked at it a long time. Then we swallowed it, as we always do, for it would be discourteous not to.

And as it went down, we knew what she had said. Not the words. The grandmother’s fish do not carry words. But we knew the shape of it, as one knows the shape of a ship’s keel in the dark by the way it moves the water.

Tomorrow.

She will come tomorrow.

Be kind to her, old thing. Or at least be fair.

We lay coiled around our rock, and the wall we had built in the eighth life to keep out hope cracked straight across, from top to bottom, and fell.

Of the Shoes

We will tell now what we did that night. It is not the kind of thing we usually do, and we are not entirely proud of it, for it was the doing of a creature that has let itself hope, and we had promised ourselves we would not.

We uncoiled from our rock.

Not as we had uncoiled at the thud, all at once, without meaning to. We uncoiled slowly and deliberately, the whole length of us, turn by turn, until we lay free of the black stone for the first time in many years. We swam out from the rock along the ledges, slowly, the bell on our tail tolling softly in the dark. The coral crown on our head brushed the overhangs, and the small fish who nest in the folds of our body scattered, alarmed. We swam to the deep coral on the western face of the reef, where the ledges are broad and the sand is white and the old things lie.

It is there that we leave our shed sheaths.

Each year, as all vipers do, we shed the shoes of our fangs. The outer sheaths of the great curved teeth loosen, crack at the root, and come away whole. We rub them off against the coral, slowly, over many days, and leave them lying on the white sand of the western ledges. There they lie for years, untouched; for the creatures of the reef do not like to go near them, and the dry ones do not know where they are. They are harder than stone, those sheaths, and smoother than the inside of a shell. They do not rot and they do not crumble. The sea cannot wear them down. There are hundreds of them on the western ledges, the sheddings of all eight of our lives, lying in the white sand like the bones of a great beast.

We had never before given one away.

We went among them slowly, in the dark, looking. We knew what we were looking for, though we had not known that we knew until that night. We wanted two that matched. Two from the same shedding, so that they would be the same color and the same pattern and the same weight, a true pair, as a pair of shoes ought to be. We wanted them recent, so that they would still hold something of us in them; for a fang knows the fang it came from, and the more recently it came, the better it knows. And we wanted them from the season of Blooming.

The dry ones call it a week, the week of Blooming. But to us it is a season, the only season, the one that comes round once in every month and once, more deeply, in every year. In that season the hills above Saltcoil burst into flower and the scent of them drifts down into the harbor and sinks through the water. It reaches even our rock, faint and sweet and strange, the only thing of the land that has ever come to us whole. We do not know what the flowers look like. We have never seen them. But we know their scent. And our sheddings in the season of Blooming are always the best of the year: the clearest, the strongest, the most deeply green, as if something of the flowers’ scent had got into them as they grew.

We found them at last on the farthest ledge, near the edge of the deep: two sheaths from the season of Blooming in the month of Selnus, at the very beginning of this year. They lay side by side in the white sand where we had rubbed them off against the coral. They were each nearly as long as a dry one’s forearm, curved, tapering to a fine point. In the dark they were only pale shapes. But we knew that when the light came down they would be green, green like the sea when the light is in it, smooth as a held breath.

We took them in our mouth, gently, as a mother serpent takes her young. We carried them back along the ledges to our black rock, and set them down on the broad flat top of it, side by side, where they would be the first thing a visitor saw. Then we rubbed them, one at a time, with the soft white sand from the foot of the rock, slowly, all over, to take off the faint film of the sea that had settled on them since the spring. It took a long time. We did not mind.

They will be too large for her. We know this. She is a woman of scales, and we are a monster of the reef, and our fangs are each as long as her forearm. She will not be able to wear them as they are. But the dry ones have craftsmen; there is a gnome in Ropewalk Lane, the chain tells us, who is very good with his hands and very cross about it. That is not our affair. Our affair is to give them, if she comes, and if she agrees to the price.

The price.

We had not known, before that night, what the price would be. But as we rubbed the sheaths with the soft white sand in the dark, we found that we knew it. It came to us as the decision to swim to the western ledges had come, without our asking. And we found, too, that we had known it for a very long time, perhaps for all eight of our lives. It had only been waiting for someone to ask.

She would dance. If she hung from the ropes of the ships, she must dance there. She must dance every day for one full month of the moon, all seven weeks and all seven days of each week, forty-nine dances. Each dance she must do without falling. And on each day, at the top, she must look down at the water and tell us what she saw.

So that we might see the sky through her eyes.

It is a hard price. We know it is a hard price. Forty-nine days without a fall, for a serpent with a broken tooth who has already fallen once. Many dry ones would call it cruel. But it is not meant to be cruel. It is meant to be fair. It is meant to be the exact weight of the thing we want, set on one side of the scale against the exact weight of the thing we give. For what we give is the strongest teeth in all of Saṃsāra, and what we want is the sky. We have wanted it eight lives. Forty-nine days is not so very much against eight lives.

And the month. We thought of that too, rubbing the sheaths in the dark. If she came tomorrow, and agreed, and went to the gnome in Ropewalk Lane, and he made the shoes, it would be the very end of the month of Lathandus. The dance would begin with the month that follows. Tyrus. The month named for the god of justice, in the dry ones’ calendar. We do not know the gods of the dry ones. We do not worship them. But we liked that. We liked it very much. Let the bargain be fair, we thought. Let it be weighed in the month of justice. Let it be just.

Or perhaps it was simply the next month. Both are true. Most things are.

Of Waiting

So now we lie coiled around our black rock again, in the deep below Saltcoil, with two green sheaths from the season of Blooming set on the flat top of it before our face. We wait.

It is the dead middle of the night. The water is cold, for it is still the week of Darkness. Above us the silver ceiling of the sea is black, lit only faintly by the stars and by a soft green glow at the end of the farthest wharf, which we can just see, wavering, through all the water between. The grandmother is keeping her watch. Across from her, on the old sea wall, there is a long dark shape lying very still. We cannot see it. But we know it is there, as we knew the thud through the hull. It is sitting up, we think. It has been sitting up for some hours now. It has not lain down.

And we cannot rest.

We have not felt like this in a very long time. Perhaps never. It is a strange, aching, restless thing, like a current pulling two ways at once. It pulls us up toward the silver ceiling and the sea wall and the long dark shape sitting on it, and it pulls us down into the cold safe dark where we have lain for eight lives, wanting nothing. It is hope, and it is the fear of hope. It is the feeling of a creature that has been disappointed three times and is about to let itself be disappointed a fourth, and knows it, and cannot stop. We uncoil and coil again. We rub the sheaths with sand, though they are clean. We taste the water with our tongue, again and again, for any change. We listen. We listen as we have never listened before.

What if she does not come? The grandmother said she would. The grandmother is very seldom wrong. But grandmothers are not always right, and a serpent with a broken tooth who has learned that she cannot may decide, in the cold before dawn, that she cannot learn anything else. She may simply turn away from the sea and go back to the city, and lie in the nets, and forget.

And what if she comes, and hears the price, and says no?

And what if she comes, and hears the price, and says yes, and dances, and falls? What if she falls on the forty-eighth day, or the forty-ninth, a hundred and forty feet onto an oak deck, as she fell three days ago, and does not get up?

What if we see the sky through her eyes for forty-eight days, and on the forty-ninth she falls, and we are left in the dark again, with the memory of the sky and no way back to it? Would that be worse than never having seen it at all?

We do not know. We have lived eight lives and we do not know.

The stars are fading on the silver ceiling. The black is going to gray. Somewhere far to the east, beyond the breakwater and the reef and the long white line of the breaking water, Helios is getting ready to climb out of the sea. It will come like a wet dog, shaking itself, as the grandmothers say. We are tired. We have not slept in three days. We lie coiled around our black rock with our head resting on the flat top of it, beside the two green sheaths, and our eyes open, looking up.

And then, far off, at the very edge of hearing, there is a sound.

It is very small. It is a splash. Not a falling fish, not a dropped stone, not an anchor or a net. It is something long and heavy entering the water slowly and deliberately from a height, the way a serpent enters the water when it has made up its mind. It comes from the foot of the old sea wall, at the end of the next wharf over from the grandmother’s.

We do not move. We do not dare.

We lie coiled around our black rock, every scale along the whole ninety feet of us standing on end. The bell on our tail is silent. The coral crown on our head is very still. The two green sheaths from the season of Blooming lie on the stone before our face. And we listen with all that we are to the small faint sound of something swimming, very slowly, very badly, against the current. It is swimming east, which costs twice the strength. It is swimming toward the reef.

Toward us.

• Segment 11: The Old Shell Under the Swimmer

There is a thing that happens every morning in Saltcoil that hardly anyone sees, because hardly anyone is awake to see it.

Helios climbs out of the sea.

You might think that a star would rise grandly, with trumpets and a great deal of fuss, the way a king comes into his hall. It does not. In Saltcoil, at least, it comes up out of the eastern sea exactly like a wet dog climbing out of a pond. First there is only a glow on the water, low down at the edge of the world, gray and then pink and then gold. Then the top of its head comes up, round and bright and dripping. Then the rest of it heaves itself up after, slowly and clumsily, as if the sea did not want to let it go. And then, when it is all the way out and sitting on the edge of the water, it shakes itself. It really does. Anyone who has ever watched it carefully will tell you so. It gives a great shiver from end to end, and the gold flies off it in every direction and lands on the waves in a thousand bright splashes, and the whole sea is spattered with light. Then it climbs up into the sky, quite dry, and pretends nothing happened.

The old grandmothers of Saltcoil have always said this. The children laugh at them, and the grandmothers say, go and look for yourself, then. Most of the children never do, because Helios rises between four and six in the morning, and children do not like to get up then. But the grandmothers are right. They usually are.

That morning, the morning of Transmuday, the fourth day of the week of Darkness, there were three creatures awake in Saltcoil to watch Helios climb out of the sea. Two of them were not watching it at all.

The first was a serpent woman on the old sea wall at the end of the next wharf over. She had sat up all night under a fishy wool blanket and an old kelp shawl, looking out at the reef where the water broke white. She was looking at the reef still. She did not see Helios at all, though it came up right behind the reef and turned the breaking water from white to gold.

The second was a great old creature coiled around a black rock deep below the reef, where no light reaches. It was looking up through all that water toward the silver ceiling of the sea, and listening. It could not see Helios. It could only feel the water above it growing faintly warmer, faintly brighter, as the light came down.

The third was an old grandmother on the last piling at the end of the farthest wharf. She was watching Helios. She always watched it. She had watched it climb out of the sea every morning for more years than anyone could count, and she never got tired of it, and she always laughed, very softly, when it shook itself.

But that morning she did not laugh. She watched it shake the gold off itself onto the waves, and then she turned her old head and looked across the little stretch of water at the old sea wall. She saw the serpent woman stand up.

Or rather, she saw the serpent woman rise, for a serpent cannot stand. She rose up on her long body as serpents do, lifting her head and shoulders high off the stone with the rest of her coiled beneath. She pushed off the fishy blanket. She took the kelp shawl from around her shoulders, the grandmother’s own shawl, and held it a moment in her hands, looking at it. Then she folded it. She folded it carefully and neatly, in half and in half again, the way you fold a thing that belongs to somebody else and that you mean to give back. She laid it on the stone, on top of the folded blanket, with the empty stew bowl beside it. She put one hand flat on top of the shawl, as if to say thank you, or as if to say wait for me, or both.

Then she looked out at the reef.

“She is going,” said the old horn-shell on its iron straps on the piling beside the grandmother. “She is going now.”

“She is going,” said the grandmother.

The serpent woman went to the edge of the old sea wall, where the great gray stones dropped straight down into the water. She looked down a long moment. Then she slid off the edge, smoothly, head first, the long green body following after like a rope paying out from a coil. She went into the sea with hardly a splash at all, and was gone.

“She will drown,” said the third piling. “She has a broken tooth and she has not eaten properly in three days and she is cold. The water is cold, it is the week of Darkness. And that is a long way to the reef. She will drown, and the harbor master will write her in his little black book.”

“She will not drown,” said the grandmother.

“How can you be sure?”

The grandmother did not answer. She was getting up.

Now you must understand that the grandmother did not often get up from her piling in the morning. In the evening, yes, she got up to go home, slowly, with her staff and her creaking knees, after she had counted the ships. But in the morning she sat. She sat from the time Helios climbed out of the sea until the fishing fleet had gone out past the breakwater, all thirty of them. She counted them out as she counted them in, and only then did she get up and go about her business. Everyone in Saltcoil knew this. The pilings knew it best of all. So when she got up that morning, with the fishing fleet not yet stirring and the wharf still empty and gray, all twelve pilings creaked at once in astonishment.

“Where are you going?” said the fourth piling.

“Out,” said the grandmother.

“Out where?”

“Out,” said the grandmother, and clicked her beak.

She did not take her staff. She leaned it carefully against the piling where she always sat. She did not take her bucket of fish. She left it beside the staff. She went to the very edge of the wharf, where an old iron ladder ran down the side of the last piling into the sea, its rungs green and slippery with weed. She turned around, slowly, the way an old woman turns, and began to climb down it.

“She is going in,” said the third piling. “She is going into the water! At her age! In the week of Darkness! She will catch her death!”

“She will not catch her death,” said the old shell, very quietly.

“How do you know?”

The old shell did not answer either. It had been empty a long time, and had learned that there are some questions that are better not answered, even by a shell.

The grandmother went down the ladder rung by rung. Her old flipper-hands gripped the iron and her old feet felt for each step, slowly, carefully, as old women go down stairs. When she came to the bottom rung, just above the water, she stopped. She looked once back up at the wharf, at her staff leaning against the piling and her bucket beside it and the twelve old pilings standing in their double row. Then she let go.

There was a splash. It was a small splash, smaller even than the serpent woman’s. It was the kind of splash a stone makes, or an old log rolling off a bank. The pilings creaked and the ropes stirred and the old shell hummed. Then the water closed over the place where she had gone in, and the end of the farthest wharf was empty, and the pilings were alone.

“Well,” said the third piling, after a long while. “Well, I never.”

“Nineteen years I have stood here,” said the fourth piling, “and I have never seen her do that.”

“You have seen her do it many times,” said the old shell. “You have only never noticed.”

And that was all it would say.

Now you shall hear what happened under the water.

It is a different world under the water. Everyone knows that, but hardly anyone thinks about it. Above the water there is air, and light, and wind, and the shouting of gulls and the creaking of ships and the talk of the dry ones. Below the water it is green and dim and quiet. The light comes down from the silver ceiling in long wavering bars. Everything moves slowly, the weed and the fish and the drifting specks of life, as if the whole world had been put into a dream. Sounds are strange. They come from everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. The cold is a soft cold, not a sharp one, a cold that wraps around you like a wet blanket and holds you close.

And there is the current.

The current in the harbor of Saltcoil runs from east to west. It always has. It always will. It is the great river of the sea, the river that runs all the way around the world, east to west, east to west, without ever once stopping to rest. It flows past every island and every reef and every wharf and every sea wall. It runs into every harbor and out again. It is very old, and very strong, and very stubborn. It has a single opinion about everything, which is that everything ought to go west. A thing going west, it carries along gladly, like a friend. A thing going east, it pushes against with the whole weight of the sea behind it, saying no, no, wrong way, go back. So it costs twice the strength to go east as to go west. Every sailor in Saltcoil knows this. Every fish knows it. The grandmother had known it all her life.

And the serpent woman was swimming east.

The grandmother saw her almost at once. She had come down off the iron ladder into the green dim water, and turned, and swum out under the end of the farthest wharf, past the weedy feet of the pilings, into the open harbor. And there, a little way ahead and a little way above, near the silver ceiling, was a long green shape, swimming.

She was swimming badly.

She was a serpent, and serpents can swim. Everybody knows that too. They swim the way they move on land, with that long ripple from head to tail, and when they do it well it is a beautiful thing to see. But this serpent was hurt. She had fallen a hundred and forty feet onto an oak deck three days ago, and the hurt was still in her, in every bend of her long body. She had not eaten properly in three days. She was cold, so cold, with the cold of the week of Darkness, and her blood had gone slow and thick in her the way a serpent’s blood does in the cold. Her ripple was ragged. It started at her head and ran a little way down her body and then broke, and started again, and broke again, like a wave breaking on a shoal. She was swimming with her arms as much as her body, pulling at the water with her hands as a dry one would. Every few strokes she came up to the silver ceiling to breathe, gasping, and went down again.

And the current was pushing against her. Steady and patient and stubborn as a mule. No, it said, no, wrong way, go back. Every stroke she made forward, it pushed her half a stroke back. She swam east toward the breakwater and the reef beyond, and the current pushed her west toward the rocks at the harbor mouth, and she swam and swam and hardly moved at all.

The grandmother, below her in the green dim water, watched her for a while.

Now, you might be wondering what the grandmother looked like in the water. You might be picturing an old shellback woman with a beak and wrinkled skin and creaking knees, paddling along slowly and painfully, the way old women do when they go into the sea at the bathing beach in summer. If you are picturing that, you are wrong.

She did not paddle. She flew.

There is no other word for it. In the water the grandmother’s old heavy shell, which made her so slow and bent on land, was not heavy at all. It was light as a leaf, and smooth, and shaped for the water as a gull’s wing is shaped for the air. Her old flipper-hands, which were so clumsy with a staff, were not clumsy at all. They swept through the water in long slow beats, like the wings of a great bird, and with each beat she went forward a long, long way. Her old knees did not creak. Her old eyes did not squint. She was swift, and silent, and graceful as a dream, and she went through the green dim water as easily as a thought goes through your head. She was twice as fast in the water as on the land. Some said three times, some four.

And she looked, from below, exactly like a great old sea turtle. The kind the fishermen sometimes see far out beyond the reef, rising slowly up to breathe and sinking slowly down again, so old that moss grows on their shells. The kind the fishermen say are lucky, and drop a fish over the side for when they pass. The kind they call, sometimes, when they are deep in their cups, the old ones, or the grandmothers of the sea.

Well. I will not say more than that. Some things belong to the grandmother.

She watched the serpent woman struggle for a while. She did not go near her. She stayed below, deep in the green dimness, where a serpent swimming near the surface would never think to look. She watched the ragged ripple and the gasping breaths and the current pushing. She saw the serpent woman begin to drift sideways, west and south, away from the breakwater and toward the rocks at the harbor mouth. There the water broke white and churning over the black stone, and many a small boat had been lost in a storm.

The serpent woman did not see the rocks. She was looking ahead, at the reef. She was swimming with her whole heart and her whole body and every last bit of her strength, straight toward the reef. She did not know that the current had her, that she was drifting, that every stroke was carrying her a little farther from where she meant to go and a little nearer to the rocks.

The grandmother rose up through the water beneath her, quietly, slowly, like a stone rising in a dream. She came up under the serpent woman’s long body, just behind the shoulders, where it was thickest. With the top of her old mossy shell she pushed, gently, firmly, east.

The serpent woman jerked. The grandmother felt her jerk, felt the long body go tight with fright, felt the ragged ripple stop. She held still beneath her, very still, like a rock. A rock, that was all. A big old mossy rock, rising up off the bottom of the harbor. Nothing to be afraid of.

The serpent woman looked down.

She saw only moss. Soft green moss, waving gently in the water, on something broad and round and brown beneath her. A rock, she thought. The grandmother could see her think it, could see the fright go out of her long body and the tightness ease. A rock. A big old rock, covered in moss. Rocks do not hurt you. She put one hand down and touched the moss. It was soft and cool, and she rested a moment, with her hand on the rock and her long body draped over it, gasping.

And while she rested, the rock moved.

Slowly. Very slowly. So slowly that the serpent woman, resting, with her eyes half closed, did not notice. The rock moved east. Out of the current, away from the rocks at the harbor mouth, back toward the breakwater, back on course. It carried the serpent woman on top of it as gently as a mother carries a sleeping child, a little way, only a little. Not so far that she would notice. Just far enough.

Then the rock sank away beneath her, slowly, and was gone into the green dim water. The serpent woman was swimming again, alone, toward the breakwater, a little stronger for her rest, a little nearer to where she meant to go. She did not look back. If she had, she would have seen nothing. Only green water, and wavering bars of light, and far below, so deep it was hardly there at all, a dark round shape moving away.

“A rock,” she said to herself, when she came up to breathe. The grandmother heard her, from below. “A lucky rock.”

And the grandmother smiled, as much as a beak can smile, and said nothing.

So it went, all the way out to the reef.

It was a long way. It was farther than you would think, looking at it from the wharf. From the end of the farthest wharf to the breakwater, and through the gap in the breakwater, and out across the open water beyond to the reef, is nearly two miles. Two miles against a current that costs twice the strength is like four miles in still water. Four miles, for a serpent woman with a broken tooth and three days of hunger and cold in her and a hurt in every bend of her long body, is a very, very long way indeed.

She swam. She swam and swam. She came up to breathe and went down again. Her ripple grew more ragged and her strokes grew weaker, and the current pushed and pushed and pushed. No, it said, no, wrong way, go back. And every time she began to drift, every time her strength began to fail, every time the current began to carry her west and south toward the rocks or the open sea, there was a rock.

Sometimes it was a rock. Sometimes it was a log, a big old waterlogged log with moss on it, drifting just beneath the surface, that happened to be drifting east, against the current, which logs do not do. The serpent woman was too tired to notice that. Once it was a sandbar, a long smooth hump of sand that rose up under her just as she was sinking. She lay on it a little while and breathed. When she swam off it again she did not notice that it was gone, sunk away behind her, or that sandbars do not do that either. Once, when she was very tired and very cold, and had gone down to breathe and not come up again, and was sinking slowly, slowly, into the green dim water with her eyes half closed, it was something warm and broad beneath her. It lifted her up, steadily, all the way up to the silver ceiling, until her head broke through into the air and she gasped and gasped.

She did not know what it was. She was too tired to know. She only gasped and coughed and blinked the water out of her gold eyes, and found herself floating on the surface with the breakwater behind her and the reef ahead. And she said, aloud, in her soft blurred broken voice, to nobody, to the sea, to the gold-spattered morning:

“Thank you.”

Below her, in the green dim water, the grandmother sank slowly away, and did not answer.

But she heard it. Oh, she heard it.

And I will tell you a thing about the grandmother. She did not tell it to anyone, not the pilings, not the ropes, not even the old horn-shell, who knew most of her secrets already. When she heard that thank you, said to nobody, to the sea, by a serpent woman who did not know and must never know who had helped her, the grandmother felt something rise up in her old chest, warm and bright. It was a kind of pride. Not the loud kind, the kind that wants to be seen and praised and thanked to its face. The quiet kind. The kind a grandmother feels when she has slipped a coin into a grandchild’s pocket and walked away before the grandchild could find it. The kind that is happier for being secret, that would be spoiled if anyone ever knew. She held it in her the way you hold a warm stone in your hand on a cold day, close, so it will not lose its heat.

The serpent woman would never know. That was the whole of it. That was the best part. She would go to the reef and meet the old one and make her bargain, and dance her dances, and do whatever she was going to do. And all her life, whenever she told this story, if she ever told it, she would say: I swam to the reef against the current. It cost twice my strength, and I nearly drowned, and I made it. And it would be true. She did swim. She did nearly drown. She did make it. Nobody would ever tell her about the rocks that moved and the logs that drifted east and the sandbars that sank away. Nobody would ever spoil it for her.

The grandmother would see to that.

The reef, when they came to it, was very beautiful.

It always is, at that hour, when Helios has just climbed out of the sea and shaken itself. The light comes down slanting through the water in long gold bars. It falls on the coral, which is every color in the world: pink and orange and purple and gold and a deep velvet red, branching and fanning and spreading like a garden that some giant had planted under the sea and then forgotten. Small bright fish dart in and out of it, blue and yellow and striped. The weed waves in the current. Far below, where the reef drops away by ledge and shelf and broken stair into the deep, the water goes from green to blue to a dark velvet nothing, where the light gives up.

The serpent woman came to the edge of it and stopped.

She floated there near the surface, her long green body hanging in the gold-barred water, and looked down. The grandmother, below her and a little way off, hidden in the shadow of a great fan of coral, watched her look. She saw the serpent woman’s gold eyes go wide. She saw her look at the coral, the colors, the darting fish. Then she saw her look past all that, down, down, at the ledges and the shelves and the broken stairs falling away into the dark.

The serpent woman knew. The grandmother could see it. Nobody had told her where to go. The grandmother had only pointed at the reef. But the serpent woman knew, as serpents know such things, that what she was looking for was not up here among the bright coral and the darting fish. It was down there. In the dark. Where the light gives up.

She took a breath at the surface, a long one, all the way from the bottom of her long chest. She held it. Then she turned her head down and dived.

She went down slowly, the long green body following after, past the bright coral and the darting fish, past the first ledge and the second. The gold bars of light slid off her back one by one as she went deeper and the water grew dimmer around her. Then she was only a shape, a long pale shape going down and down into the blue, and then into the darker blue. Then she was gone.

The grandmother did not follow.

She hung in the shadow of the great coral fan at the edge of the reef, where the bright water ended and the dark began, and watched the place where the serpent woman had gone. She did not go any farther. That was not her place. She had brought the serpent woman to the edge, and what was beyond the edge belonged to someone else. It was between the serpent woman and the old one in the dark, and the grandmother had no business in it.

Still, she waited a while. She hung there in the shadow of the coral and looked down into the deep, where there was nothing to see. And after a while, a long while, she felt something.

It came up out of the dark, from very far down, where the light gives up. It was not a sound, and it was not a movement in the water, and it was not anything you could see or touch. It was an attention. Something very large and very old, coiled around something very hard and very dark, deep below, had turned its attention up toward the edge of the reef. Toward the great coral fan. Toward the old shell hanging in its shadow. It held its attention there a moment, steady and patient as a stone.

The grandmother held still under it. She did not move, not even her flipper-hands. And then, very softly, so that not even the darting fish could hear, she clicked her beak once.

The attention turned away again, back down into the dark, toward the long pale shape going down to meet it.

The grandmother turned, and swam home.

Going home was easy. Going home was west. The current took her the moment she turned, gladly, like an old friend, and carried her back across the open water and through the gap in the breakwater and into the harbor. She hardly had to sweep her flipper-hands at all. She lay in the current with her old mossy shell to the silver ceiling and let it carry her, and thought about nothing much, and was content.

But she did not go straight back to her piling. She went first to the old sea wall at the end of the next wharf over. She came up out of the water at the foot of it, where the great gray stones went down into the sea, and climbed up the stones, slowly, with her clever old claws. It was not easy for an old shellback. When she came to the top she was dripping and puffing and her knees were creaking again, for she was on land now, and on land she was old.

There on the top of the wall, on the flat gray stone, lay a fishy wool blanket, folded, and an empty stew bowl, and on top of the blanket a kelp shawl, folded carefully and neatly in half and in half again, the way you fold a thing that belongs to someone else and that you mean to give back.

The grandmother picked it up. She held it a moment. Then she shook it out and wound it back around her shell and her shoulders, where it belonged, and tucked it in at the neck.

She left the blanket. It was Merran’s. She left the bowl. It was the tavern’s. She climbed down off the old sea wall, slowly, on the landward side, and walked back along the next wharf and around to the farthest wharf. She walked along it, past the twelve old pilings and the tired ropes, step by slow step, all the way to the end, and sat down on her worn piling. She took up her crooked driftwood staff where she had left it, leaning against the piling, and laid it across her knees, and folded her flipper-hands on top of it.

And there she sat in the thin cold light of the week of Darkness, which is never very warm, but is better than nothing. She let it dry her. She sat, and sat, and dried.

“Where did you go?” said the third piling.

“Out,” said the grandmother.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing,” said the grandmother.

“You are wet.”

“I am always wet,” said the grandmother. “I am a shellback. The shawl keeps me damp.” Click.

The third piling did not believe her. None of the pilings believed her. But there was nothing they could do about it. Pilings cannot follow anyone anywhere, and so they never know what anyone does. They creaked to one another, crossly, and the grandmother pretended not to hear.

“You helped her,” said the old horn-shell on its iron straps, very quietly, so that only the grandmother could hear.

The grandmother did not answer.

“She will never know,” said the old shell.

“No,” said the grandmother. “She will never know.”

“Does that not make you sad? That she will never know, never thank you?”

The grandmother thought about this for a long time, looking out at the sea, where the reef broke white in the distance, gold now in the full morning light.

“She did thank me,” she said at last. “She thanked the sea. That is close enough.” Click.

By the time the fishing fleet began to stir, she was dry.

Not dry as you or I would be dry, after a bath. Dry as old wood is dry, dry as driftwood that has been lying on the beach a long time in the sun and the wind. Her skin was gray and wrinkled and creased. Her old shell was dull and mossy and dusty. Her old knees creaked. Her old eyes squinted. She sat on her worn piling at the very end of the farthest wharf, with her crooked staff across her knees and her damp kelp shawl around her shoulders and her bucket of fish beside her. She looked exactly as she had looked every morning for more years than anyone could count: an old grandmother who could not possibly have been anywhere but on that piling, ever, at all.

Merran came down the wharf to the Gull’s Daughter with her pipe in her mouth and her uncle Brek grumbling behind her. “Morning, Grandmother!” she called, waving her hat.

“Morning, child of the gulls,” said the grandmother. Click.

“Cold one again.”

“Cold,” agreed the grandmother.

Merran stopped and looked at her a moment, with her head on one side. “You look tired, Grandmother,” she said. “Didn’t you sleep?”

“I am old,” said the grandmother. “Old women do not sleep. We sit.” Click.

Merran laughed her laugh like a dropped bucket and went on down to her boat.

And then the young sailor came.

He came running down the next wharf from the city, the cocky, freckle-faced, sunburnt youth from the Prosperous Aunt who had sat beside the serpent woman for three days and said nothing. He was running, which sailors do not do in the morning, and his face was white under the freckles. He ran all the way to the end of the next wharf, to the old sea wall. He stopped there and stood looking at the empty stone, and the fishy blanket folded on it, and the empty bowl. He looked out at the sea, and down at the water at the foot of the wall, and back at the stone. Then he turned, and saw the grandmother on her piling across the little stretch of water. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted.

“Grandmother! Grandmother! The serpent woman! She’s gone! She’s not on the wall! Did you see? Did you see where she went?”

The grandmother looked at him across the water with her milky old eyes. She looked at him for a long time. Something warm and wicked and very fond rose up in her, like bubbles in a pot.

“Gone?” she said.

“Gone! She’s gone! Did you see her go?”

“Gone,” said the grandmother.

And she said nothing else. Not one word. Not then, and not ever, to anyone. She only sat on her worn piling at the end of the farthest wharf in Saltcoil, dry as driftwood, with her staff across her knees and her shawl around her shoulders. She looked out at the sea, where the reef broke white and gold in the distance. Far beyond it and far below it, in the dark where the light gives up, a serpent woman with a broken tooth was coming face to face with something very large and very old.

And as the fishing fleet began to cast off its lines, one boat and then another, the grandmother began, softly, to count them out.

“One,” she said. “Gull’s Daughter.”

Click.

• Segment 12: The Price of the Sky

Of the Descent

There is a thing that every creature of the deep knows, and that no creature of the dry world ever learns until it is too late. The sea does not end. It only grows darker.

The dry ones think of the sea as a floor with water on top of it, like a puddle in the road, or a bath. They think that if they swim down far enough they will come to the bottom and stand on it, as one stands on the bottom of a bath. And in the shallows, near the wharves, along the beaches where the children dive for shells, this is so. But beyond the reef it is not so. Beyond the reef the bottom falls away by ledge and shelf and broken stair, and each ledge is darker than the one above it, and each stair goes down into a deeper blue. There is no bottom that a dry one could reach, or that we ourselves have ever reached, though we have lived eight lives at the edge of it. There is only the dark, going down and down, colder and quieter and more patient the farther one goes. It is like a story told by a very old grandmother that never quite finishes, but only trails away, softer and softer, until one is not sure whether it is still being told.

Down into that, on the morning of Transmuday, the fourth day of the week of Darkness, came the serpent woman.

We felt her coming long before we saw her. We had felt her enter the water at the foot of the old sea wall, as we have told. We had felt her swim, slowly and badly and with her whole heart, against the current that costs twice the strength. And we had felt, from time to time, along the way, a certain other presence in the water beneath her. It was old, and slow, and moss-grown, and it moved in a way that rocks and logs and sandbars do not move. We do not speak of it further. It is not ours to speak of. At the edge of the reef, when the serpent woman stopped and hung in the gold-barred water and looked down, we felt that other presence pause too, in the shadow of a great coral fan. We turned our attention to it, and held it there a moment. It clicked, once, softly. And we turned away.

And then the serpent woman dived.

We felt her come down past the first ledge, and the second. We felt the water around her grow dimmer and colder as she came. We felt her breath, held long in her long chest, and the slow thick beat of her serpent’s blood in the cold, and the hurt in every bend of her. She came down past the bright coral and the darting fish, past the weed and the fans and the sponges. She came into the blue, where the coral grows pale and strange and the fish are few and large and slow. She came farther and farther, deeper and deeper, until the last of the light was a faint gray glimmer far above her, like a window in a house seen from the bottom of a well.

And we understood, all at once, that she would never reach us.

Our rock lies too deep. We had not thought of it, in all our long preparation through the night, rubbing the green sheaths with sand on the flat top of the stone. We had thought only of the price and the month and the bargain, and not of the plain cold fact of the water. A serpent of the land, a serpent of the warm sea wall, can hold her breath a long time, longer than any dry one of two legs. But not long enough to come down to where we lie, and speak, and listen, and go back up again. Not with a broken tooth and three days of hunger and cold in her. The deep would take her. She would come down and down, and her breath would give out somewhere on the way, in the cold blue dark between the light and the rock, and she would never come up again. And the eels would sing about it for a week, and the shrimp for a year, and then nobody would remember.

So we did a thing we had not done by day in four lives.

We rose.

We uncoiled from the black rock and took the two green sheaths from the season of Blooming gently in our mouth, as a mother serpent takes her young. And we went up. Up from the black rock, up past the lowest ledge where the old things lie, up through the dark velvet blue, our long body unspooling beneath us like a cable paid out from a winch. The bell on our tail was silent, for we held it still. The coral crown on our head brushed the overhangs, and the small fish who nest in the folds of us scattered in alarm, for they had never known us to rise by day. We rose until the dark gave way to blue, and the blue grew faintly lighter, and the water around us was no longer black but the color of evening. And there, on a broad ledge of pale coral at the very edge of the dark, where the light gives up and the deep begins, we stopped. We coiled ourselves around a pillar of old white coral there, a dead thing, long since turned to stone, as we coil around our black rock below. We set the two green sheaths down on the ledge before us. And we waited.

She came down out of the blue above us like a long pale ribbon falling.

Of the Meeting

Let us tell what we saw, for we have thought of it every day since, and we wish to tell it truly.

She was smaller than we had imagined. That was the first thing. We had imagined her, from the eels and the octopus and the shrimp and the thud through the hull, as something large, something grand, a great green serpent who had climbed to the top of the sky. But she was not large. She was a woman of scales, long, as serpents are, perhaps a sixth of our own length, and slender, and very tired. Her body came down through the blue water in that long ragged ripple, breaking and starting again, breaking and starting again, like a wave on a shoal. Her arms pulled at the water as a dry one’s would. Her scales, which should have been the green of the sea when the light is in it, were dull and dark with cold and with hurt. In places along her length they were scraped and cracked, where she had struck the yard and the sail and the oak deck of the Prosperous Aunt.

But her eyes. Her eyes were gold. Gold as a coin held up to the sun, even down there in the blue dark where there was hardly any sun at all. They were wide open, and they were looking for something, and when they found us, they stopped.

She hung there in the water above the ledge, a little way above us and a little way off. She looked at us. And we looked at her.

We have been looked at many times in our eight lives. We have been looked at with fear, by the young fisherman with the knife in his teeth and by the boys who swam out past the breakers to prove their courage. We have been looked at with hatred, by the brothers with their harpoons, and with greed, by the doubled ones with their fire, and the old mage in his bubble of air, and the poachers who wanted our crystal. We have been looked at with indifference, by the hulls, which do not look at anything. We have been looked at with curiosity, by the diver and the gull-woman, long ago. And we had thought, in eight lives, that we had been looked at every way there is.

We had not been looked at like this.

She was not afraid. That was the strange thing. She was a serpent woman of the dry ones, a sixth of our length, hurt and cold and holding her breath in the deep dark at the edge of the world, face to face with a monster of the reef. A monster with a mouth as large as a rowboat and fangs each as long as her forearm, who had killed the dry ones in six lives and been killed by them in seven. And she was not afraid. We could taste it in the water. There was no fear in her at all. There was something else instead, something we did not at first recognize, it had been so long. And then we did recognize it, and our scales stood on end along the whole ninety feet of us.

It was the look of a creature who has found the thing she was looking for.

It was the look we would have given the sky.

She opened her mouth. A few small silver bubbles came out of it, round and bright, and drifted up past her face toward the faint gray window of the light far above. We saw her broken tooth then: the right fang snapped off short, jagged at the root, and the left one with its long dark crack. We saw her close her mouth again quickly, to keep in her breath. She had not spoken. She had only begun to, and stopped, because she did not know what to say.

So we spoke first.

“Serpent woman,” we said.

Our voice in the water is not like the voice of the dry ones in the air. It is low and slow and very deep. It comes up out of the long dark length of us and goes out through the water in every direction at once, so that the coral hums with it and the fish scatter and the small loose things on the ledges tremble. The dry ones who have heard it, the few who have heard it and lived, say that it sounds like a tide going out through a cave. We do not know if that is true. We have never heard a tide go out through a cave. But the serpent woman heard it, and her gold eyes went wider, and she did not swim away.

“Serpent woman,” we said again. “We know why you have come. You want our old fang shoes, so that you can hang by your mouth from the ropes of the ships.”

She stared at us. More bubbles came out of her mouth, a long silver string of them, and in the bubbles were words. They were small and blurred and strange, wrapped up in the silver like seeds in a pod, and they drifted up past us toward the light. But we heard them as they went by, as one hears a whisper passing in the dark.

“How do you know this?”

We considered how to answer. There was a great deal we might have said. We might have told her of the chain: the fishermen and the fish, the eels and the crabs, the octopus and the grouper and the shrimp. We might have told her of rumor in water, and how it bends and changes and must be sifted like stones on a jeweler’s cloth. We might have told her of the thud through the hull and the eels’ cruelty and the crabs’ recital and the octopus’s moral and the song the shrimp were singing all over the reef. We might have told her of the small silver fish falling through the dark, and the grandmother at the end of the farthest wharf, and what we had known of the grandmother, and for how long.

But she was holding her breath. We could see it in her, how much was left and how fast it was going. It was not much, and it was going fast. There was no time for a long account. There would be time for long accounts later, if there was a later, and we found that we very much hoped there would be.

So we said only:

“The fish talk.”

She blinked.

“And the fishermen talk to the fish,” we said. “And the grandmother talks to everyone.”

Something happened at the corner of her broken mouth. Some small movement, a twitch, a lift. It was the beginning of a smile, the ghost of one, the first we had seen on her face. More bubbles came out of her, and among them, quite clearly, the word “grandmother,” and then something else that sounded like “of course.” And then she asked, in a long silver string of bubbles that came out of her all at once, as if she could not hold it in:

“Will you give me your fang shoes?”

Of the Price

We had known the answer to that question for many hours. We had known it since the small silver fish came falling through the dark on the evening of Abjursday, and the wall we had built in the eighth life to keep out hope cracked straight across and fell. We had known it rubbing the green sheaths with soft white sand all through the night. We had known it uncoiling from our black rock and rising, by day, for the first time in four lives. We had known it, if we are honest, since the morning of the thud. Perhaps since the morning of the gasp that came down through the stones of the old sea wall. Perhaps since the morning she hatched on the sand of the lower beach, beside her sister, a small green wriggling thing, and we lay below and felt her come into the world, and thought nothing of it at all.

“We will give them,” we said.

Her gold eyes shone.

“But hear our price.”

And here we must stop, and say a thing about prices, before we tell what ours was.

The dry ones think of a price as a thing one pays to get a thing one wants, as a coin is paid for a loaf of bread. They think that the best price is the lowest, and the worst is the highest, and that the art of the bargain is to pay as little as one can for as much as one can get. So when they hear of a monster of the reef asking a price for a gift, they think at once of something terrible: a life, a soul, a firstborn child, a heart cut out and given in a box. That is what the songs of the dry ones are full of, monsters asking terrible prices. We have heard the fishermen sing such songs over the sides of their boats. We have been in some of them.

But that is not what a price is. Not a true price. A true price is not the lowest thing one can pay, nor the highest. It is the thing whose weight, set on one side of the scale, exactly balances the weight of what is given on the other. A true price is a kind of justice. It says: this, which you take, is worth that, which you give, and neither of us has cheated the other. It is very hard to find a true price. Most creatures never do. They pay too much or too little all their lives and are always a little sorry. But when one finds it, one knows it. It rings, like a good bell, like a true note struck on a glass.

We had found ours in the night, rubbing the sheaths with sand. We knew it rang true. But we did not know whether she would hear it ring, or whether she would hear only the weight of it, and swim away.

“We have lived under the water,” we said, “for many lives.”

She hung still in the blue water above the ledge, listening, with her breath held.

“We have died here seven times,” we said. “And come back. Always as ourselves, always as a viper. Always starting small. We have lain on a black rock in the deep below your harbor for longer than your harbor has had a name. We have watched the hulls of your ships pass over us, by the thousand, by the ten thousand. We have heard your fishermen talk and your sailors sing and your grandmothers drop fish into the sea. We know a great deal about your world, serpent woman. More than you would think.”

We paused. We had not said the next thing aloud in eight lives. We had scarcely said it to ourselves.

“But we have never once seen the sky from above.”

She did not move.

“We cannot climb,” we said. “We cannot fly. We are too long, too heavy, too slow. We are made for the deep and the dark. When we look up, we see only the silver ceiling of the sea. On the far side of it, the bottoms of the ships. And the bottoms of the ships,” we said, and could not keep something out of our voice, something that made the coral hum strangely, “are not beautiful.”

Her eyes, in the dim blue, were very bright.

“So hear our price,” we said. “If you hang from the ropes of the ships, you must dance there. And you must dance there every day for one full month of the moon. All seven weeks, and all seven days of each week. Forty-nine dances. And each dance you must do without falling.”

She flinched. We saw it. A small jerk, all along her long body, like a rope twitching when a weight is set on it. We knew why. She had already fallen once. Three days ago she had fallen a hundred and forty feet onto an oak deck, and the hurt of it was still in every bend of her. Forty-nine days without a fall. It is a hard thing to ask of anyone. It is a harder thing to ask of one who has already fallen.

But we did not soften it. A true price does not soften. If it is softened it does not ring.

“And on each day,” we said, “at the top, you must look down at the water and tell us what you see.”

We paused again. We found, to our surprise, that our great deep voice was not quite steady.

“So that we may see the sky,” we said, “through your eyes.”

Of the Breath

There was a silence on the ledge at the edge of the dark.

It was a long silence. The water was very still. The pale coral did not hum. The small fish who had scattered at our rising had not come back. The faint gray window of the light far above did not change. The serpent woman hung in the blue water above the ledge, a little way off and a little way above, with her gold eyes on us and her broken mouth closed, and she did not speak.

And then, all at once, she turned and swam away.

Up. Up and away from the ledge, toward the faint gray window of the light, the long ragged ripple going through her body as fast as she could make it go. Her arms pulled at the water. Her tail lashed. She went up past the first stair of the dark and the second, smaller and smaller, a long pale ribbon rising, and then she was gone into the blue.

And we lay coiled around the dead white coral pillar on the ledge at the edge of the dark, with the two green sheaths on the stone before us, and something in us that had been warm went cold. It went cold as the water of the week of Darkness, cold as the black rock below, cold as the trench beyond the reef where the thing lives that ate us in the fifth life.

She had heard the price. She had heard the weight of it and not the ring. She had gone.

Four, we thought. The fourth time. The diver who climbed the hill and drowned. The gull-woman who flew too high and did not come back. The mage who promised the bowl and forgot, or failed, or missed a day. And now the serpent woman, who heard the price and swam away. Four hopes. Four disappointments. And this the worst, because this time we had risen. This time we had uncoiled from our black rock and come up by day, for the first time in four lives, to the edge of the light, to meet her. This time we had said aloud the thing we had not said in eight lives. And she had swum away.

We lay there. We did not move. We did not know what else to do. We had no rule for this. We had made our rule in the eighth life, to want nothing from the dry ones, and we had broken it. Now there was nothing behind it but the cold.

And then we tasted something in the water.

It was very faint. It came down from far above, from the faint gray window of the light. It was salt and cold and the smell of the morning air, and under it, faint and familiar, the taste of a serpent. A serpent breathing.

She had not gone away. She had gone up.

To breathe.

We had forgotten. Fool that we were, old cold fool, with eight lives behind us and all our long accounts of the sea, we had forgotten the plain cold fact that we had remembered only an hour before. She was holding her breath. She had held it all the way down from the surface to the ledge, and all through our speech, every word of it, the lives and the hulls and the sky and the price. And she had come to the end of it, and she had gone up to breathe, because if she had not she would have drowned.

That was all. That was all it was.

We lay on the ledge with every scale on end and our tongue tasting the water, over and over, for any change. We listened. We listened as we had listened all the night before, as we had never listened before. And we waited, which is the thing we do best in all the world, and which we found, that morning, we could hardly do at all.

She came back.

She came down out of the blue above us again like a long pale ribbon falling, faster this time, with her long body rippling strongly from head to tail. She came all the way down to the ledge, nearer than before, near enough that we could see the cracks in her scales and the dark root of the broken fang. She hung there in the water before our face, with her gold eyes looking into ours, and she spoke. The bubbles came out of her in a long bright silver string. We heard every word of it as it rose past us, and we have kept every word since, as the grandmother keeps her beads.

“Yes,” she said.

The coral hummed. The water trembled. We did not know that we had made a sound.

“Yes,” she said again. “Forty-nine days. Every day. Without falling. And every day I will tell you what I see.” She paused, and her broken mouth did the thing at the corner again, the lift, the beginning of a smile, but bigger this time. “I’ll tell you all of it. Every boat. Every gull. Every color. You’ll be sick of me by the end.”

“We will not,” we said.

“You will,” she said. “Everyone always is.”

And then she asked the question we had been waiting for. It was the only question that mattered. The answer to it was the thing we had found in the night, rubbing the sheaths with soft white sand, without knowing that we had found it.

“How will you hear me,” she said, “from the bottom of the sea?”

Of the Shoes

We opened our mouth.

We had not opened it before her. We had spoken without opening it wide, as we do, letting the voice come up out of the long dark length of us. But now we opened it all the way, the great mouth that is as large as a rowboat, slowly, so as not to frighten her. And we showed her our fangs.

They are each as long as a dry one’s forearm. They curve down from the roof of our mouth like two great white tusks, smooth and pale and sharp at the tip, and in the dim blue light at the edge of the dark they glimmer faintly. At the root of each, set into the gum where the fang meets the jaw, there is a pearl. Two pearls, round and pale and the size of a child’s fist, grown there over many years. They are the pearls by which we hear. And as we showed them to her, they began, very softly, to glow.

She did not flinch. She looked at our fangs a long time, and at the pearls, and her gold eyes were full of wonder.

Then we closed our mouth, slowly, and bent our head down to the ledge, and took up the two green sheaths from the season of Blooming. We took them gently, as a mother serpent takes her young, one in each side of our mouth. And we held them out to her.

They were green, now that the light was on them, even the little dim blue light at the edge of the dark. They were green like the sea when the light is in it. Smooth as a held breath. Each one curved and tapering to a fine point, each one nearly as long as her forearm, each one shed whole in the season of Blooming at the beginning of the year. There were faint fine lines along them like the grain in good wood, and they caught the light and held it, the way the inside of a shell holds the color of the sunset long after the sun is gone.

“Bite our shoes,” we said, holding them out. “And hang. And speak with your mouth closed on them. We will hear.”

She looked at them. She looked at us.

“A fang,” we said, “knows the fang it came from.”

She reached out with both hands, slowly, as one reaches for something very precious that one is afraid to drop, and took them.

We felt it the moment she touched them. It went through the sheaths and into the pearls at the root of our fangs and into our jaw and down the whole long dark length of us to the tip of our tail and the bell lashed there. It was a small warmth. A tingle. A touch, like a hand laid on a shoulder in the dark. It was the touch of her fingers on our old shed teeth, felt through our living ones, as one feels a footstep on the far end of a long rope bridge. A fang knows the fang it came from. We had known that we would feel it. We had not known it would be warm.

We had not known it would be so warm.

She held them against her chest, the two green sheaths, the way the grandmother holds her bracelet of beads. She looked down at them a long time. Then she looked up at us, and her gold eyes were wet. In the water it is hard to tell. But we have lived eight lives at the edge of the dark, and we know when a creature is weeping, even in the sea.

“They’re too big,” she said. Her bubbles were small and shaky. “For my mouth. They’re too big.”

“They are,” we said. “We are a monster of the reef, and you are a woman of scales. The dry ones have craftsmen. That is not our affair.”

“There’s a gnome,” she said slowly, “in Ropewalk Lane. The tavern girl told me. He makes things for teeth.”

“Then go to him,” we said. “The month of Lathandus has four days left in it. Take them to your gnome and let him make them fit. And on the first day of the month that follows, at Helios up, climb your mast. That month is called Tyrus, in your calendar, after the god of justice. We do not know your gods. But we would like the bargain to be weighed in the month of justice, so that it is fair.” We paused. “Or perhaps it is only that Tyrus is the next month. Both are true.”

She laughed. A real laugh this time, though it came out in bubbles, a whole bright cloud of them that rose up past us toward the light. It was a loud rattling laugh, even under the water, like a cart going over a bridge.

“Both are true,” she said. “Most things are.”

And she held the green sheaths against her chest, and looked at us a long last moment, and turned to go.

She stopped, a little way above the ledge, and turned back.

“Why?” she said. “Why the sky? Of everything. You could have asked for anything. You could have asked for my crystal when I die, or my firstborn, or my heart in a box, like in the songs. Why only the sky?”

We considered how to answer. There was a great deal we might have said. But her breath was going again; we could see it. So we said only the truest thing we knew.

“Because we are homesick,” we said, “for a place we have never been.”

She looked at us a long while. Then she nodded, slowly, as if she understood, as if she too had been homesick for something, once, somewhere, in some other life, under some other sky. Then she turned and swam away, up, toward the faint gray window of the light. She held the two green sheaths in her mouth, gently, sideways, between her lips, the way a mother cat carries a kitten. The long ripple ran clean through her body from head to tail, strong and smooth, the way a serpent’s ought to run. She went up past the first stair of the dark and the second, smaller and smaller, a long pale ribbon rising, green at one end where the sheaths caught the light. And then she was gone into the blue.

We felt her reach the surface. We felt her breathe. And we felt her turn west, toward the harbor, toward the old sea wall and Ropewalk Lane and the gnome who makes things for teeth. The current took her the moment she turned, gladly, like an old friend, and carried her home. It was easy, that part. Going west always is.

Of What Remained

We lay coiled around the dead white coral pillar on the ledge at the edge of the dark for a long time after she had gone.

We did not go back down to our black rock at once. We did not want to. We wanted to stay there, at the edge, where the last of the light came down faint and gray from the window far above. We could feel through the pearls at the roots of our fangs, very faintly, the two green sheaths moving away from us through the water toward the harbor. They were going farther and farther, and still we could feel them, as one feels the far end of a rope.

And something in us was warm.

We do not have a good word for it. We have searched for one, in the long dark since, and not found it. The dry ones may have one; they have words for most things, even things that cannot be said. It was like the first warmth that comes into the water at the end of the week of Darkness, when the great banded world slides away from the face of Helios and the light comes back down through the silver ceiling, and the cold that has been in us so long that we had forgotten it was cold begins, very slowly, to let go. It was like the scent of the flowers of the hills in the season of Blooming, sinking down through the water to our rock, the only thing of the land that has ever come to us whole. It was like the fishermen singing above us on the evening of our seventh death, that slow old song for the dead. It was the first time anyone had sung for us, and it was a strange thing to feel at the end of a life: that someone had noticed we were there.

It was hope. That is the plain word, and we will use it, though it does not say enough. It was hope. It was old, old hope, hope we had buried at the bottom of eight lives under a wall we had built to keep it out, hope we had thought was dead. And it was not dead. It had only been waiting, as we wait, coiled in the dark. Now it had uncoiled, and risen, and come up into the light, and it was warm. Startlingly, impossibly warm, the way a coal that has lain cold in the ashes all night will suddenly, when you breathe on it, glow red.

She had said yes.

She might fall. We knew that. She might fall on the second day, or the twentieth, or the forty-ninth, as she had fallen three days ago, a hundred and forty feet onto an oak deck, and not get up again. She might give up. She might forget. The hope might be disappointed, as it had been disappointed three times before, and the fourth would be the worst of all, because this time we had let it in all the way.

But she had said yes. She had heard the price and gone up to breathe and come back down and said yes. She had taken the green sheaths in her hands and held them against her chest and wept. She had laughed in bubbles. She had said, I’ll tell you all of it, every boat, every gull, every color. And she had said, you’ll be sick of me by the end.

We will not be sick of her. Not if she tells us every boat and every gull and every color, every day, for a thousand years.

At last, as the light far above grew stronger and the morning wore on toward noon, we uncoiled from the white coral pillar and went down again. Down through the blue and the darker blue and the dark velvet nothing to our black rock in the deep below Saltcoil, which was once fire and still remembers it. We coiled ourselves around it, turn upon turn, as we have for eight lives. We laid our head on the flat top of it, where the green sheaths had been. And we looked up toward the silver ceiling of the sea, far above, which we could not see.

The month of Lathandus has four days left in it. Then Tyrus. Forty-nine days. Forty-nine dances.

We have waited eight lives. We can wait four days.

But for the first time in all those lives, all eight of them, we find that we do not want to wait. We want it to be now. We want her at the top of the mast now, with our green sheaths in her teeth and the whole harbor spread out beneath her. We want to hear her voice come down through the old shed fang and the pearl and the jaw into the long dark length of us, telling us what she sees.

The sky. She will tell us the sky.

We lie coiled around our black rock in the dark. We do not sleep. We are, for the first time in eight lives, a little bit warm.

• Segment 13: Shoes Too Large for a Woman of Scales

Being a Further True and Exact Account by Tibbet Gearwhistle, Silversmith and Toothwright, of Ropewalk Lane, Concerning a Visitor, Two Objects of Doubtful Origin, and a Commission He Did Not Want and Accepted Anyway

Of a Visitor

On Transmuday, the fourth day of the week of Darkness, in the month of Lathandus, in the year 8612a, at nineteen minutes past ten o’clock in the morning by my clock, the door of my shop opened and admitted a quantity of seawater.

I say a quantity of seawater because that is what I noticed first, and I set things down in the order in which they occurred. It came in over the threshold in a broad wet sheet, running across the floorboards toward my workbench and the jar of fine pumice on the low shelf beside it. I had refilled that jar only the previous afternoon, at six copper the pound. I rose at once from my stool and moved the jar to a higher shelf, which took four seconds. Only then did I turn to see what had brought the seawater in.

It was a serpent woman.

She was wet from the crest of her head to the tip of her tail, which last was still outside on the step, for she was a great deal longer than my shop is deep. My shop measures nineteen feet and four inches from the front door to the back wall. Her head was near my workbench and her tail was in Ropewalk Lane, so I estimated her total length at not less than twenty-four feet, and very likely more. She was green, though of a dull and dark green, and her scales were cracked and scraped in a number of places along her length. Water ran off her in streams and pooled on the floor around her in a manner I found highly objectionable. She was shivering, a fine continuous trembling from end to end, like a taut wire struck with a hammer. Her eyes were gold, and she was holding something in her mouth.

I knew who she was. Everyone in Saltcoil knew who she was by then. She was the serpent woman who had climbed the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt three days before, bitten the signal halyard at the main truck, hung from it by her teeth, and fallen.

I had predicted that she would fall. I had said so, in so many words, to Sabbet’s daughter, on the afternoon of the seventh day of the week of Dimming. I had said that a serpent woman had no more business on a mast than a fish had on a horse, and that if she climbed it she would fall off. She had climbed it, and she had fallen off. I will not pretend that I took no satisfaction in this. I am a gnome of science, and there is always a satisfaction in a prediction confirmed.

I will record also, since I promise exactness, that my satisfaction lasted until she took the thing out of her mouth and I saw her teeth.

But I am getting ahead of my account.

She laid what she had been carrying on my workbench. She did it very carefully, with both hands, as one lays down a sleeping infant or a cracked egg. Then she stepped back from it, or rather drew her head and shoulders back from it, since she had nothing to step with, and looked at me.

“Are you the gnome who makes things for teeth?” she said.

Her voice was long and soft and hissing, as the voices of serpent folk are. But there was something else in it, a blur and a whistle in the softer sounds, which I attributed at once, correctly, to some defect of the dentition.

“I am a silversmith and toothwright,” I said. “I make things for teeth among other things. What is it you want?”

“These,” she said, and put one wet hand on what she had laid on my workbench. “I need you to make these fit my teeth.”

I looked at them.

Of the Sheaths, and Their Measurement

There were two of them, and I will describe them exactly, as I describe everything that comes into my shop, so that the reader may judge them for himself without relying upon the impressions of others. The impressions of others in Saltcoil, on the subject of these objects, have since become very exaggerated.

They were sheaths of enamel. That is to say, they were hollow curved cones of hard smooth material, open at the wide end and closed at the narrow end, of exactly the shape of the outer covering of a serpent’s fang. I had seen such things before, on a small scale. The reef vipers that fishermen sometimes bring up in their nets shed the sheaths of their fangs, as all vipers do, and the small sheaths occasionally wash up on the lower beach. Children collect them, and jewelers sometimes buy them to set in cheap rings. They are about the size of a fingernail paring. I have handled perhaps a dozen in my career and paid perhaps two copper for the lot.

These were not about the size of a fingernail paring.

I lowered the third lens of my goggles and measured the larger of the two with my calipers. It was nine inches and three-eighths in length along the outer curve from the open end to the tip. It was two inches and eleven sixteenths across the open end at its widest, tapering to a point so fine that my calipers could not take it, and I had to resort to the finest gauge in my set, which reads to the hundredth part of an inch. The smaller was nine inches and five-sixteenths in length, two inches and five-eighths across the open end, and its point was identical. The two differed in length by one sixteenth of an inch, which in a pair of natural objects is a remarkable degree of agreement. From this I concluded that they had come from the same animal at the same time.

I weighed them. The larger came to seven ounces, one pennyweight, and nine grains; the smaller to six ounces, nineteen pennyweight, and fourteen grains. This is a great deal of weight for a hollow object of that size. It told me at once that the material was very dense, much denser than any enamel I had worked before.

I examined their color. They were green. I will be precise about this, since the color is one of the points on which accounts have since grown fanciful. They were a pale clear green, somewhat translucent, like sea glass of the better quality, or like seawater seen in a glass held up to the light. There were faint fine lines running along their length, like the grain in good wood. The material was smooth to the touch, and cold, and somewhat slippery. I describe it as I found it, and it was green, and it was smooth. It was not, as I have since heard said in the taverns of Ropewalk Lane, green like the sea when the light is in it, nor smooth as a held breath. Those are not measurements. Those are poetry. I do not deal in poetry.

I tested its hardness. This I did, as is my custom with any unfamiliar material, by drawing the edge of my finest needle file across an inconspicuous part of the inner surface near the open end. My finest needle file will mark any enamel I have ever met, and most steels, and all silver. It did not mark this.

I tried again, with more pressure. It did not mark it.

I tried a third time, with the full weight of my arm behind it and the bracer on my right forearm glowing a dull warm yellow. I attribute that glow, as I have explained elsewhere, to the light of the lamp on the polished leather. The file skated across the surface as if across glass and left nothing behind it, not a line, not a scratch, not a single grain of dust.

I set down the file. I sat a moment looking at the sheath. Then I took up the coarse grade of pumice from its jar and rubbed a pinch of it against the inner surface with my thumb, hard, for thirty seconds by my clock. When I brushed it away, the surface beneath was not dulled in the least. If anything it was a little brighter than before. And the pumice had been ground to a fine powder, much finer than I had ground it in the mortar, as if it, and not the sheath, had been worn away.

I will set down here, because I have promised to be exact, that I did not like this at all.

“Where did you get them?” I said.

Of the Fish

“A fish gave them to me,” said the serpent woman.

I looked at her over the top of my goggles. I have found that this look is effective with customers who are being foolish. It was not effective with her. She looked back at me with her gold eyes, quite steadily, still dripping on my floor.

“A fish,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “not a fish exactly. A viper. The Reef Viper. She lives on the reef beyond the breakwater, in the deep. She’s very old and very big, and she sheds the shoes of her fangs every year in the season of Blooming, and leaves them in the coral. I swam out to her this morning, and she gave me these.”

“The Reef Viper,” I said, “is a fishwife’s tale.”

“She’s not,” said the serpent woman. “I saw her.”

“Then you saw something,” I said, “and the fishwives told you it was the Reef Viper, and you believed them. That is how tales are made. A thing is seen, and a story is put on it, as a coat is put on a peg.” I took up the larger sheath again and turned it in my hand. “Let us consider this matter scientifically. Let us suppose, for the sake of the argument, that these sheaths were shed by a viper. The common reef viper of the waters of Lapita grows to a length of about four feet. Its fang sheaths measure about three-eighths of an inch. These sheaths measure nine inches and three-eighths. That is twenty-five times the length of the common sheath. If the animal that shed them were of the same proportions as the common reef viper, it would be twenty-five times the length, which is to say about one hundred feet long, or perhaps ninety, allowing for some variation of the jaw.”

“About ninety,” said the serpent woman. “Yes. That’s about right.”

“A ninety-foot viper,” I said, “in the harbor of Saltcoil.”

“Not in the harbor. Beyond the breakwater. On the reef.”

“A ninety-foot viper,” I said, “living on the reef beyond the breakwater of Saltcoil, within two miles of the city. For how long, do you suppose?”

“Longer than the city’s been here. She says.”

“She says,” I said. “She talks, then.”

“Yes.”

“A ninety-foot talking viper,” I said, “which has lived on the reef beyond the breakwater since before the founding of the city, within two miles of eleven thousand people. Not one of them has ever caught it in a net, or struck it with an anchor, or seen it rise to breathe, or noticed it in any way whatever except in stories told by fishwives. I have lived in Saltcoil for sixty-one years, madam, and I have never once heard a credible report of such an animal. I find it improbable.”

“Everyone’s heard of her,” said the serpent woman. “The fishermen drop fish over the side for her when they pass the breakers. For luck.”

“The fishermen,” I said, “also believe that one should not whistle on a boat, for fear of raising a wind. I whistle constantly. I have never once raised a wind.”

She looked at me. I looked at her. Water continued to drip from her onto my floor.

“Then where did I get them?” she said.

This was a fair question, and I am bound by my own principles to consider fair questions fairly. I considered it. I turned the sheath over in my hands. I examined it through the third lens of my goggles, which, I am obliged to record, glowed somewhat more brightly than usual. In the instant of looking, I knew beyond any doubt that the object in my hands was the shed sheath of a living viper’s fang. I knew that it had been shed recently, within the year. I knew that it had lain since then in salt water, among coral, at a depth of not less than sixty fathoms. I knew it was very old, older than any enamel I had ever handled, not in its own substance but in the substance of the animal that had made it. Something about it was old in the way that the black rock under the city is old.

I attribute this knowledge, as I have explained elsewhere, to forty years of looking at things through good lenses.

“You found them,” I said firmly, “on the lower beach. They are the sheaths of some large species of sea serpent not yet properly described. Such an animal may well exist in the deep waters far from land, and its sheaths may have been carried here by the current, which runs east to west, as everyone knows. The fishwives then put the story of the Reef Viper on them, as one puts a coat on a peg. That is the scientific explanation. And that is the whole of it.”

“I swam out to the reef,” said the serpent woman, “this morning. Against the current. It nearly killed me. I dived down to the edge of the deep. I saw her, coiled around a coral pillar, ninety feet long, with a crown of coral on her head and a bell tied to her tail. She talked to me, and she gave me these from her own mouth, and I carried them back in mine.” She said all this quite quietly, without any heat, still dripping. “You can believe whatever you like. But that’s what happened.”

I said nothing. I found, somewhat to my irritation, that I could think of nothing to say. So I said, “Hmph.” That is a useful remark at such moments, since it commits one to nothing.

And then I said, because the question had been in my mind since she came through the door, and I am a gnome who does not leave questions unasked: “Why did she give them to you?”

The serpent woman looked down at the two green sheaths on my workbench. When she looked up again there was something in her gold eyes that I did not know how to measure.

“Because I’m going to dance for her,” she said. “On the mast. Every day for a month. Forty-nine days. Without falling. And every day, at the top, I’ll tell her what I see. So she can see the sky.”

I looked at her for a long moment over the top of my goggles. Then I looked at the sheaths. Then I looked at her mouth.

Of Her Teeth

I will now record the thing that ended my satisfaction, as I promised.

She had opened her mouth to speak, and I had seen her teeth, or rather her fangs. Serpent folk have no other teeth worth mentioning; they swallow their food whole and have no need to chew it. The two long fangs hang down from the roof of the mouth past the lower lip, and in a healthy serpent woman of her size they would each measure perhaps four and a half inches. They should be smooth, pale, unbroken, and sharp at the tip.

Hers were not.

The right fang was broken off short. I asked her permission, as a toothwright must, and lowered the third lens of my goggles, and held a small lamp to her mouth, and looked closely. It had snapped clean across about an inch and a quarter below the root, leaving a jagged stump whose broken face was dark with dried blood at the center, where the soft living core of the tooth had been laid bare. The edges of the break were sharp and irregular, like the edge of a broken pot. It must have hurt her a great deal to close her mouth over it, and a great deal more to swallow.

The left fang was whole, but cracked. A fine dark line ran from the root nearly to the tip along its outer curve, three inches and seven-sixteenths in length. I knew what it meant, as any toothwright would. It meant that the left fang would break also, at the next great strain, along that line, as surely as a cracked mast breaks in a gale.

I asked her how it had happened. She told me. She told me of the signal halyard at the main truck of the Prosperous Aunt. She told me how she had bitten it and let go and hung from it by her teeth alone, and spun. She told me of the crack, like a pot breaking in the next house, and the fall. She told me of the oak deck and the young sailor with the cup and the harbor master’s speech about the gulls, which she did not understand and nor did I. She told me of the three days on the old sea wall. She told it all quite plainly, without heat, still dripping on my floor, with her broken mouth.

When she had finished, I found that I had put down my lamp and was sitting on my stool with my hands on my knees, looking at the floor.

I record this because I am bound to record it. I do not account for it. I had predicted that she would fall, and she had fallen, and there is always a satisfaction in a prediction confirmed. But I found that I was no longer satisfied. I found that I had been thinking of her fall, when I predicted it, as one thinks of a stone falling or a pot falling, as a thing that happens and is noted and is done with. I had not been thinking of a jagged stump with dried blood at the center, or a crack three inches and seven-sixteenths long, or a serpent woman sitting three days on a frozen stone looking at the sea.

I do not like to be wrong. I was not wrong. She had fallen, exactly as I said. But I found that being right had not been worth as much as I thought.

“Hmph,” I said again, to the floor.

Then I got up and fetched my wax.

Of Terms

There is a great deal that can be done for a broken fang by a competent toothwright, and I am a very competent one. I will set out what I proposed to her in order, as I set it out at the time, so that the reader may see that my reasoning was sound from the beginning.

First, the sheaths. These were far too large for her fangs; that was plain at a glance. They had been made by an animal of perhaps ninety feet in length, if one accepted the fishwives’ tale, which I did not. They would have to be cut down, ground, and reshaped to fit her fangs exactly, inside and out, so that they sat on them as a thimble sits on a finger. On the left fang, the cracked one, the sheath would serve as a cap, holding the cracked tooth together from outside and spreading the strain over its whole surface so that the crack could not open further. On the right fang, the broken one, the sheath would serve as a crown. It would be fitted over the stump and seated on it as a cap is seated on a post, and would replace the missing portion entirely, restoring the fang to its full length and more. The stump would need to be filed smooth first, to take away the jagged edges and give the crown a proper seat. This would be painful, and I told her so. She said she did not mind. I said that she would mind when I was doing it, and she said she supposed she would, and that she would not mind afterward. I found this a sensible answer.

Second, to do this I must have exact impressions of her fangs. I proposed to take them in beeswax, softened in warm water and pressed into a small curved tray made for the purpose. The tray is pressed over the fangs and held steady until the wax sets, and the impression thus taken is used as a guide for shaping. I took them then and there. I softened the wax in a pan of warm water on the edge of the forge, filled the tray, and asked her to open her mouth. I pressed the tray up over her fangs, the stump and the cracked one together, and held it, while she held very still and the wax set. It took nineteen minutes, which is somewhat longer than usual, because her mouth was cold from the sea and the wax would not set evenly at first. When I drew the tray away the impression was perfect. I examined it through the third lens. Every ridge and hollow of the broken stump was recorded, every jag and splinter, down to the sixty-fourth of an inch. I have never taken a better impression in my career. I attribute this to the quality of the wax, which I buy from a beekeeper on the hill at four copper the cake.

Third, the sheaths, once fitted, would want tips and bands of silver. The tips are needed because the very point of the sheath, fine as it is, must be cut away to fit the length of her fangs and would otherwise be left blunt. A needle-point of silver fitted over the end restores the sharpness, and serves besides to protect the point from chipping. The bands are needed because the open end of the sheath, where it meets the gum, must be finished and sealed, and held firm at the root of the fang. A band of silver around the base does this and serves also to anchor the whole. I proposed tips like needles and bands like rings.

Fourth, I proposed to set a crystal in the left band.

She asked why. I told her plainly.

“A crystal,” I said, “is an honest thing. People speak of crystals as though they were magic, and they are not. They are batteries. They are things of storing, like jars. A jar holds water. A crystal holds power. It does not care what power is put into it, nor what is done with the power when it is poured out. It is merely a container. I set crystals into my work because they are useful, as a jar is useful, and for no other reason. You have, I take it, a little magic of your own, as all adults do. If you wish to use it with these sheaths for any purpose, it will do you no harm to have a place to keep it. That is all a crystal is. A place to keep things.”

I happened to have such a crystal. I had bought thirteen tier-one crystals from the crystal-setter in Bell Street the previous week, at three silver apiece. They were for the twelve silver buttons of a ship’s captain’s coat, and I had bought one more than needed in case one should crack in the setting. None had cracked, and the thirteenth was in a twist of paper on the shelf above the forge. It was a small dull pale thing, the size and weight of a coin, eighty-four grains, the color of sea glass on the beach. It had been taken, the crystal-setter told me, from the skull of a reef eel. I showed it to her. She looked at it a long time.

“It’s the same color,” she said, “as the sheaths. Almost.”

“It is a pale green,” I said. “So are a great many things. It is a coincidence.”

She looked at me. I looked at her.

“Hmph,” I said.

Fifth, the enamel would want to be treated before it was worked, to prepare it for the silver and the crystal and the lacquer. I proposed a bath in reef venom, one full day, from one Helios up to the next, mixed with a little crushed pumice. Reef venom is the standard bath for enamel of marine origin, as every toothwright knows. It softens the surface very slightly so that the silver will bond to it, and seals the grain so that the lacquer will take. It is obtained from the apothecary in Bell Street, who gets it from the small reef vipers caught in the fishermen’s nets, at a cost of one silver the vial.

“It’ll remember the reef,” said the serpent woman, when I told her this.

“It will do nothing of the kind,” I said. “Enamel does not remember. It is a chemical process. The venom penetrates the surface layer and alters its porosity. And that is the whole of it.”

She did not argue. But she smiled, a little, at the corner of her broken mouth, and I found this more irritating than argument.

Sixth, the whole, when finished, would want a lacquer of ground silver and mangrove sap to seal it, and a final fitting, and a period of trial, for adjustment.

And seventh, there was the matter of time.

“When do you need them?” I asked.

“By the end of the month,” she said. “Before the first day of Tyrus. I have to climb on the first day of Tyrus, at Helios up.”

I consulted my clock and my calendar. It was then eleven minutes past eleven o’clock on Transmuday, the fourth day of the week of Darkness. The month of Lathandus ended at Helios down on Illusday, the seventh day of the same week. That left three days and some hours, sixty-six hours less the time already elapsed, and less a full day of twenty-two hours for the venom bath. I worked it out on a scrap of paper. The cutting and shaping of the enamel would take four hours. The venom bath would take one full day. The casting of the silver would take three hours, and the engraving four. The setting of the crystal would take one hour. The lacquer would take one hour, and must dry overnight. The fitting would take thirty minutes. The whole could be done by the evening of Illusday, provided nothing went wrong, and I worked without rest, and the venom bath began no later than the following morning.

“It cannot be done,” I said, “by any reasonable craftsman.”

“Can you do it?”

“I can do it,” I said. “I said no reasonable craftsman could do it. I did not say that I could not.”

And then there was the matter of the price, which I will record exactly, because it is the part of this account of which I am proudest.

The materials: silver for the tips and bands, two ounces, one silver. One tier-one crystal, three silver. One vial of reef venom, one silver. Mangrove sap and wax and pumice, two copper. The labor, at my standard rate for a rush commission of the first rank of difficulty, three silver. The total was eight silver and two copper. I struck off the two copper, out of a feeling that round numbers are tidier, and told her: eight silver.

She looked at me a long time. Then she reached into a small wet pouch at her waist and took out a single copper coin and laid it on my workbench beside the green sheaths.

“That’s all I have,” she said. “It’s my wages. From the Prosperous Aunt. Mister Larkspur signed me on as crew for one day so I could climb, and gave me one copper. It’s all I have in the world.”

I looked at the copper. I looked at her.

I will record here what I did next, and the reasons for it, since I know that it will be misrepresented.

I drew up a contract. I took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote out in a clear hand the terms of the commission. The work to be done, and the materials, and the time, and the price, eight silver. The price to be paid as follows: one copper on signing, which she had already laid on the bench, and the remainder in full within one month of the completion of the work. The rate of interest in the event of late payment was set at one copper per week, which is not unreasonable. And I added a clause, which I drafted with some care, providing that in the event of the customer’s death or disappearance before payment in full, the finished work would revert to the craftsman, who might do with it as he pleased.

I did not add that clause because I wanted the work. I added it because it is a sound commercial principle. I would add it to any contract.

I read the contract aloud to her, since she told me she could not read. She listened gravely to every word. When I had finished she asked if she might sign it. I gave her the pen, and she made her mark at the bottom: a wavering sprawling line like a coiled snake, done by someone who had held a pen perhaps once before in her life. I signed it beneath her mark in my own hand, Tibbet Gearwhistle, Silversmith and Toothwright, Ropewalk Lane. I blotted it and folded it and put it in the drawer of my bench, and put the copper coin in my cashbox.

“Why?” she said. “Why will you do it, if I can’t pay?”

“You can pay,” I said. “You will pay. You are going to dance on the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt every morning for forty-nine days. You are going to hang from it by your teeth over the harbor of Saltcoil, where every sailor and dockhand and fishwife in the city will see you, and they are going to throw coins. They threw coins at you three days ago, I am told, before you fell. They will throw a great many more if you do not. In a month you will have eight silver several times over. I am making a sound investment in a commercial undertaking of reasonable promise. And that is the whole of it.”

She looked at me a long time with her gold eyes, and the corner of her broken mouth lifted, and she did not say anything. I found this more irritating than anything she had said all morning.

Of Magic, and My Refusal

There was one more thing she asked me, and I set it down last, because it was the last thing she asked before she left, and because it is the most important.

She was at the door. She had drawn her long body back out of my shop into Ropewalk Lane, all but her head and shoulders, and had turned to look at the two green sheaths on my workbench.

“Can you make them magic?” she said.

I looked up from my bench.

“The Reef Viper said,” she went on, “that if I bite her shoes and hang, and speak with my mouth closed on them, she’ll hear me, from the bottom of the sea. She said, a fang knows the fang it came from. But I don’t know how that works. I thought maybe they’d need something. Something put in them. A spell. So she can hear.”

I took off my goggles. I set them on the bench. I folded my hands in my lap and looked at her, and I spoke slowly and clearly, so that there could be no possible misunderstanding.

“Madam,” I said. “I will carve your shoes. I will put silver on them, tips like needles and bands like rings. And I will set into them a small crystal like a coin, because the crystal is honest. It is a battery. It is a thing of storing, like a jar.” I paused. “But I will put no magic in them.”

She looked at me.

“I do not do magic,” I said. “I have never done magic. I do not hold with it. Magic is the trade of mages, and mages are people who build their houses on nothing and steer them by committee and cannot pick up their own spoons. If your fish can hear you through her own old teeth, then she can hear you, and it is no business of mine. And if she cannot, then no spell of mine would help her, for I have none, and want none, and would not use one if I had it. I will make you a pair of shoes for your teeth, madam. They will be the best shoes for teeth that have ever been made in Saltcoil, or in Lapita, or in all the world. They will fit you to the sixty-fourth part of an inch, and they will not crack, and they will not break, and they will hold your weight from the top of any mast in the harbor. That is what I will put in them: honest silver, honest enamel, an honest crystal, and honest work. And that is the whole of it.”

I took up my goggles again and put them on.

“Magic,” I said, “is for people who cannot use a file.”

She looked at me for a long time from the doorway, with the water still dripping off her onto my step. Then she laughed. It was a sudden loud rattling laugh, like a cart going over a bridge, so that Sabbet across the lane put her head out of her window to see what the noise was. And she said, “Thank you, Tibbet Gearwhistle,” as if she had known my name all along, though I had not told it to her. And she drew her head back out of the door and was gone down Ropewalk Lane toward the harbor.

Of the Night

I will record the rest of that day briefly, as it was of no particular interest.

I cleaned the seawater from my floor, which took eleven minutes. I examined the jar of fine pumice on the high shelf and found that none of the seawater had reached it, which was a relief. I set aside the captain’s buttons, which were finished and awaiting collection. I laid the two green sheaths on a clean cloth on my workbench, side by side, under the lamp, so that I could begin the cutting and shaping at four o’clock the following morning, when I rose.

And then, since I had nothing else to do, I measured them again.

I record this only for exactness. I measured them again. I measured them, in fact, fourteen times between Helios down and midnight. I took every measurement I could think of: length along the outer curve, length along the inner curve, diameter at the open end and at each half inch along the taper, thickness of the wall at every point, weight, specific gravity by displacement of water in my graduated jar. Each time I took them I wrote them down in my daybook in a neat column, and each time they were the same as before, to the sixty-fourth of an inch and the grain. I did not need to take them fourteen times. Once would have been sufficient. I took them because a craftsman should know his materials, and because I had nothing else to do that evening, and for no other reason.

I also, while measuring, made certain observations. I record them here, without comment, for completeness.

When I held either sheath in my bare hand for more than about a minute, it grew slightly warm. This I attribute to the heat of my hand.

When I lowered the third lens of my goggles and looked at the sheaths for the purpose of finding their weakest point, as I do with any material I intend to cut, I could find none. I looked eleven times. There was no flaw, no weak line in the grain, no point at which the material was thinner or softer or more brittle than any other. It was perfect throughout, which no natural material is. This I attribute to some property of the deep-water environment in which the sheaths were formed, not yet properly understood by science.

When I whistled near them, as I do when examining a mechanism for misalignment, they hummed. They did not hum loudly; I had to put my ear close to hear it. It was a faint low steady note, like the note of the wind in the rigging of the ships in the harbor, or like the note a bell makes long after it has been struck, when everyone else has stopped hearing it. I whistled every note I know, and to each one the sheaths hummed back the same note in reply, precisely in tune, as a perfectly made instrument would. I have never in my life met a material so perfectly in tune with itself. This I attribute to the density and regularity of the enamel, which would naturally give it unusual acoustic properties.

And at a few minutes before midnight, I happened to set the pale crystal from the shelf above the forge on the cloth between the two sheaths, merely to compare their colors. The two sheaths and the crystal glowed. Very faintly. A pale soft green, the green of seawater in a glass held up to the light. It lasted perhaps four seconds, and then went out. I took the crystal away and set it back on the shelf in its twist of paper. I attribute the glow to the lamp.

At midnight I closed my daybook. I banked the forge. I had found earlier in the evening a heap of old nets by Hollin’s warehouse near the harbor, which I understood the serpent woman had been sleeping in. They were soaking wet, and it was the week of Darkness, and serpent folk are cold-blooded and do not do well in the cold. And she had come into my shop that morning and dripped a great deal of seawater on my floor. If she did so again on the following morning, when she came to see how the work progressed, it would very likely reach the jar of fine pumice, which I had refilled at six copper the pound. So I had sent Sabbet’s daughter down to the harbor at Helios down with a message. The message was that there was a warm corner in the back room of my shop behind the forge, where the floor was stone and would not be harmed by water. The serpent woman might sleep there for the next three nights while the work was done, at no charge, provided she did not drip on anything of value.

I did this to protect my floor. I would do the same for anyone.

I went upstairs to bed. At a little after midnight I heard the shop door open below, and a long soft sound, like a rope being drawn slowly across stone, and then nothing. When I went down at four o’clock in the morning to light the forge, she was coiled up asleep in the warm corner behind it on the stone floor. She was quite dry, and she had not dripped on anything.

I did not wake her. There was no need. I had a great deal of work to do, and I prefer to work without being watched.

I lit the lamp. I took up the larger of the two green sheaths, nine inches and three-eighths along the outer curve, and the wax impression of her fangs, and my finest saw. And I began.

I put no magic in it. I want that understood. I put no magic in it at all.

I have not been so interested in a piece of work in forty years. I do not intend to admit this to anyone.

• Segment 14: One Whole Day in the Venom

Being the Workshop Record Kept by Tibbet Gearwhistle, Silversmith and Toothwright, of Ropewalk Lane, of the Making of a Pair of Fang Caps for a Serpent Woman, Set Down Stage by Stage, in Which, Once Again, Nothing Remarkable Occurs

Preliminary Remarks

It has been my practice for forty years to keep a record of every commission of the first rank of difficulty. I note each stage of the work, the hour at which it was begun and finished, the materials consumed, the tools employed, and any observations of technical interest. I do this not from vanity, but because a craftsman who does not record his methods will forget them, and a craftsman who forgets his methods will repeat his mistakes. A record also serves as evidence, should any customer afterwards dispute the quality of the work or the time spent on it.

I set down here the record of the commission I accepted on Transmuday, the fourth day of the week of Darkness, in the month of Lathandus, 8612a. The customer was a serpent woman calling herself Velisse, of Saltcoil. The work was the fitting of a pair of enamel fang sheaths of unusual size, as a cap to her cracked left fang and a crown to her broken right one, with silver tips and bands and a crystal. I have reproduced the record exactly as I kept it, adding only such explanations as may be needed by a reader not of the trade. Where I have recorded observations, I have recorded them plainly and without embellishment, as is proper. If any of them appear remarkable to the reader, I can only say that they did not appear so to me.

The First Stage: The Filing of the Stump

Divinday, the fifth day of the week of Darkness. Four o’clock in the morning.

Rose at four, two hours and eleven minutes later than I would have wished, having slept poorly. I attribute this to the cold. Lit the forge and the lamp. Found the customer asleep in the warm corner behind the forge, on the stone floor, coiled in a manner I estimate at nine full turns. She was dry. She had not dripped on anything. Did not wake her.

Laid out on the bench the two sheaths, the wax impression of her fangs taken the previous day, my finest saw, my set of needle files, and the jar of coarse pumice.

Before any cutting of the sheaths can be done, the stump of the broken right fang must be prepared to receive its crown. A crown cannot be seated on a jagged surface. The broken face of the stump must be filed smooth and flat and shaped into a short tapering post, so that the crown will fit over it snugly and bear evenly upon it. This is the most delicate part of the whole business, and the most painful for the customer. It must therefore be done first, so that the customer may rest while the rest of the work proceeds.

At a quarter past four the customer woke of her own accord and asked what I was doing. I explained. She asked whether it would hurt. I said that it would. She asked how much. I said a great deal, but not for long, if she held still. She said that she would hold still. I asked her to rest her chin on the edge of the bench and open her mouth. She did so.

I lowered the third lens of my goggles and examined the stump. It stood one inch and a quarter from the root and was irregular in section, with a jagged face. At the center of the face was a small dark exposed area of the soft living core, about one thirty-second of an inch across, which I would need to seal before the crown could be fitted. I chose a half-round file of the finest grade, and began.

I will not describe the filing in detail. It is not a pleasant thing to describe. It took four minutes and eleven seconds by my clock. The customer did not move during that time, nor make any sound, except once, when I passed over the exposed core. Then she drew in a breath so sharply that I heard it, and her whole body tightened from crest to tail, so that the stone floor of my workshop creaked under her coils. But she did not move her head. When I had finished I sealed the core with a drop of hot silver solder, which I keep for the purpose. I gave her a cup of cold water, and she drank it, and lay down again behind the forge, and closed her eyes.

Observations: The stump was filed to a smooth flat taper, eleven sixteenths of an inch across at the base and seven sixteenths at the top, with a slight inward cant to match the curve of the fang. The work was clean and exact. My bracer glowed during the filing. I attribute this, as before, to the lamp.

I note also that I have filed perhaps two hundred broken teeth in my career. I have never before known a customer hold so still for it. I record this as a fact of professional interest only.

The Second Stage: The Cutting

Divinday. Twenty-six minutes past four.

The sheaths must now be cut down to fit the customer’s fangs. As I have noted in my previous record, they are very much too large. The larger measures nine inches and three-eighths along the outer curve, and the smaller nine inches and five-sixteenths. The customer’s left fang measures four inches and nine-sixteenths. Her right, when restored, should measure the same. Each sheath must therefore be shortened by nearly half its length, and its interior must be ground out to fit the fang exactly, inside and out.

The question was which end to cut. The open end of the sheath is wide and thick-walled. The tip is narrow and thin-walled, with the finest point. For a cap, one wants the open end to seat against the gum and the tip to form the point of the fang. But the open end of these sheaths was nearly three times the width of the customer’s fang at the root, and could not be made to fit by grinding alone. It would have to be cut away entirely, leaving only the narrower portion toward the tip. That would then be hollowed out to receive the fang.

I calculated, by comparison of the wax impression with the taper of the sheath, the exact point at which the cut must be made. It was four inches and fifteen-sixteenths from the tip along the outer curve, in the larger sheath, and four inches and seven-eighths in the smaller. At those points the inner diameter of the sheath matched the outer diameter of the customer’s fang at the root, to within a sixty-fourth of an inch. I marked the points with a fine scribe.

I took up my finest saw. It is a jeweler’s piercing saw, with a blade of tempered steel one hundredth of an inch thick and seventy-two teeth to the inch. It will cut any enamel I have ever met, and all silver, and most steel. I set the blade to the mark on the larger sheath, and began to cut.

The blade did not cut.

I mean this precisely. The teeth of the blade passed over the surface of the enamel, back and forth, under my full pressure, for thirty strokes, and left no mark. I had already observed, in my previous record, that my finest needle file would not mark the surface of this material. I had supposed that a saw might do what a file could not. It could not.

I sat a moment considering the matter. I record that I was not in any way troubled.

Then I tried a thing that I have read of in the old books of the trade but never done. I took the coarsest grade of pumice and mixed it with a little water and a pinch of fine sand from the lower beach, which I keep in a jar for polishing. I made a paste of it. I spread the paste along the line of the cut, and drew the saw through it again, slowly, with steady pressure. The paste would carry the grit into the cut, and the grit, being harder than the steel of the blade, would do the cutting, while the blade merely carried it back and forth. It is a very old method. It is very slow. It is used, the old books say, for cutting gemstones too hard for any blade.

The blade went in.

It went in slowly, a hair’s breadth with each stroke, a fine white line opening in the green enamel. I fed the paste in with a small brush as I went, and kept the stroke steady and even, and did not hurry. It took me one hour and four minutes to cut through the larger sheath, and fifty-eight minutes to cut through the smaller. When the two cut-off open ends fell away onto the bench, I set them aside in a twist of paper. They were very fine enamel, and it is a craftsman’s principle to waste nothing.

Observations: During the cutting I whistled. I am told I always whistle when I work, and I do not doubt it. But I record that during this cutting I whistled a particular tune that I had not whistled since my apprenticeship, forty-four years ago. It was a tune my master used to whistle when he was doing especially fine work. I had forgotten it entirely. I do not know why it came back to me at that moment. I attribute it to the concentration required by the work, which is known to bring up old memories.

I record also that the paste of pumice and sand, as it worked into the cut, turned faintly green, and that when it dried on the bench it was the exact color of the enamel. I attribute this to fine particles of enamel mixing with the paste.

I record also that the customer woke at some point during the cutting and lay behind the forge with her gold eyes open, watching me. I asked her to stop. She did not. I worked on regardless. I do not like to be watched at my work. I record it as a fact of no significance.

The Third Stage: The Grinding and the Pattern

Divinday. Forty-three minutes past five.

Each sheath was now a hollow cone some four inches and seven-eighths long, open at the wide end and closed at the tip. It must now be hollowed out inside to fit the customer’s fang exactly. For the left sheath, that meant her cracked fang. For the right, it meant the filed stump and the space above it where the missing portion of the fang had been, which the crown would fill. This is done by grinding the interior with a series of small cone-shaped burrs of graduated size, dressed with pumice paste. One checks the fit against the wax impression every few minutes, until the impression slides into the sheath and seats against the inner surface at every point, with neither play nor binding.

By my reckoning this ought to have taken four hours. I had allowed four hours for it in my schedule.

It took eighteen minutes.

I record this exactly because it is exactly what occurred, and I do not propose to make anything of it. I took up the first burr and dressed it with paste and began to grind the interior of the left sheath. The enamel came away under the burr smoothly and evenly, in a fine pale green dust, more easily than any enamel I have ever ground. The interior opened out to the shape of the impression as if it had been waiting to do so. I changed to the second burr and the third and the fourth, and checked the fit four times. On the fourth check the impression slid into the sheath and seated against the inner surface at every point, with neither play nor binding, perfectly. It had taken nine minutes. I did the right sheath in nine minutes more.

I examined both through the third lens of my goggles. The fit was exact to the sixty-fourth of an inch at every point I could measure, which was forty-one points in each sheath. I have never achieved a fit of such exactness in so short a time. I attribute this to the quality of the wax impression, which, as I noted in my previous record, was the best I have ever taken. And to the quality of the enamel, which, though too hard to be cut by a blade, appears to grind very kindly under a burr. That is a known property of certain hard materials, and not in itself remarkable.

My apron glowed during the grinding. My bracer glowed. My goggles glowed. All three glowed rather brightly. I attribute this to the lamp, which I had trimmed that morning, and which was giving a particularly good light.

Having completed the interior, I turned to the exterior: the scale pattern.

The customer had not asked for a scale pattern. I proposed it myself, and I will explain why. The outer surface of the sheaths, though smooth, was too smooth. A cap or crown fitted to a fang must be gripped, at times, by the lips and the tongue, and a perfectly smooth surface is difficult to grip. A pattern of fine shallow grooves gives purchase without roughness. I chose a pattern of overlapping scales because it is the pattern most suited to the work. It sheds water well, it is easily kept clean, and it can be cut without weakening the wall. And it will be appropriate to a serpent. That last point I did not consider important, but I note it for completeness.

The scales were cut with a graver, a small chisel-pointed tool of hardened steel, dressed with pumice paste, as the saw had been. I cut them in overlapping rows, beginning at the open end of each sheath and working toward the tip. Each row was a little smaller than the one before, so that the scales grew smaller and closer as they approached the point, as the scales of a living serpent do toward the end of the tail. There were thirty-one rows on the left sheath and thirty-one on the right, the scales in each row numbering between nineteen and seven. I cut the grooves deeper toward the tip, so that they caught more shadow, and the point of each sheath appeared darker than the base.

It took me one hour and fifty-one minutes. It is the finest engraving I have ever done.

Observations: While I was cutting the scales, the customer spoke. She said, “You’re smiling.” I said that I was not. She said that I was. I said that if my face had assumed any particular arrangement, it was the arrangement proper to concentration, and she should not mistake it for anything else. She said nothing more, but continued to watch me. I record this exchange because it occurred, and for no other reason.

I record also that at seven o’clock, with the scale pattern finished, I set the two sheaths side by side on the cloth under the lamp. I looked at them for some time. I do not know how long; I neglected to consult my clock, which is unusual for me. I record that they were very fine. I have nothing further to add.

The Fourth Stage: The Venom

Divinday. Forty-four minutes past seven.

The enamel must now be treated in a bath of reef venom, mixed with a little crushed pumice, for one full day of twenty-two hours. As I explained to the customer, this is a chemical process. The venom penetrates the surface layer of marine enamel and alters its porosity, so that it will bond with the silver of the tips and bands and take the lacquer evenly. It is standard practice for enamel of marine origin. Every toothwright knows it.

I had sent Sabbet’s daughter to the apothecary in Bell Street at Helios down the previous evening with one silver and a note. She had returned with a vial of reef venom, drawn from the small reef vipers caught in the fishermen’s nets. It was a cloudy pale yellow liquid, about three fluid ounces in quantity, with a faint sharp smell like lemons left too long in the sun. I poured it into a shallow glass dish, added a quarter ounce of crushed fine pumice, and stirred until the pumice was evenly suspended. I laid the two sheaths in the dish side by side, so that the venom covered them entirely. I set the dish on the high shelf above the forge, where the warmth would assist the process but not overheat it, and covered it with a clean cloth.

The time was forty-four minutes past seven o’clock on Divinday. They would come out of the bath at forty-four minutes past seven o’clock on Enchanday, twenty-two hours later. I wrote the time on a scrap of paper and pinned it to the cloth.

The customer asked whether the venom would make the sheaths remember the reef. I said, as I had said the day before, that it would do nothing of the kind. She said that the Reef Viper’s own venom would have been better. I said that venom is venom, and that the venom of a four-foot reef viper caught in a net is in every chemical respect identical to the venom of a ninety-foot viper of the deep, supposing such an animal existed, which I continue to doubt. She said nothing, but smiled at the corner of her broken mouth. I went back to work.

Observations on the bath, made at intervals during the twenty-two hours:

At ten o’clock Divinday, the venom, which had been cloudy pale yellow, had become noticeably clearer. I attribute this to the settling of the pumice.

At one o’clock Divinday afternoon, the venom was quite clear, and of a very pale green. I attribute this to fine particles of enamel dissolving into it from the surface of the sheaths.

At five o’clock Divinday afternoon, at about Helios down, I noticed that the whole shop smelled of the sea. It was not the smell of the harbor, which is fish and tar and smoke. It was the clean cold salt smell of open water, far out, beyond the reef. I had not noticed it come in. I opened the shutters to see whether the wind had changed. It had not; it was still in the north, off the land. I closed the shutters. The smell remained until the following morning. I attribute this to the venom, which is, after all, of marine origin.

At midnight, when I came down from my bed to check the bath, for I had been unable to sleep, the dish on the high shelf was glowing. Very faintly. A pale soft green, the green of seawater in a glass held up to the light. I could see it through the cloth. I lifted the cloth and looked, and the light was coming from the sheaths themselves, lying side by side in the clear pale green venom. It pulsed, very slowly, about once every eleven seconds, like a breath. I watched it for some minutes. Then I put the cloth back, and went back up to bed. I record this observation exactly. I attribute it to phosphorescence, a known property of certain marine organisms. Some very small organisms may have been present in the venom and have been disturbed by the warmth of the forge.

I record also that while I stood watching the glow, the customer, behind the forge, was awake. She had raised her head and was looking up at the high shelf, and her gold eyes caught the green light and gave it back. She did not say anything, and nor did I. After a while she put her head down again and closed her eyes. I record this as a fact of no significance.

The Fifth Stage: The Silver

Divinday. From eight o’clock in the morning until three in the afternoon, while the bath proceeded.

While the sheaths lay in the venom, I made the silver parts: two tips and two bands.

I weighed out two ounces of silver, nine hundred and sixty grains, from my stock of scrap. It was the clippings and filings of many years’ work, of good quality, ninety-two and a half parts in the hundred. I melted it in my small crucible in the forge, which took eleven minutes. I poured it into four molds I had cut the previous evening from soft stone, two for the tips and two for the bands, to the dimensions taken from the sheaths.

The tips. Each tip is a small hollow cone of silver, made to fit over the point of the sheath where the finest part of the enamel has been cut back, and to restore the point to its full sharpness. When they came out of the molds they were rough and dull. I filed them with my finest needle files, the round and the half-round and the knife-edged, inside and out, for one hour and forty minutes. At the end of that time they were needle-sharp at the point and smooth as glass on every surface. They fit over the points of the sheaths exactly, though I could not yet try them on the sheaths themselves, which were in the bath; I tried them on wax copies. The left tip weighed eighty-seven grains, the right eighty-nine. The difference arises from a slight variation in the molds, which I have since corrected.

The bands. Each band is a flat ring of silver, three-sixteenths of an inch wide and one thirty-second of an inch thick. It is made to fit around the open end of the sheath, where it meets the gum, to finish the edge and seal it and hold the cap firm at the root of the fang. When they came out of the molds I filed them smooth and true, inside and out. The left band I made a little broader at one point on its inner face, to take the bezel for the crystal. The left band weighed three hundred and fifty-one grains, the right three hundred and forty-two. The difference is the bezel.

The total weight of silver in the tips and bands was eight hundred and sixty-nine grains. Of the remaining ninety-one, I set aside twenty-four to be ground into dust for the lacquer, and returned the rest to my scrap stock.

The Sixth Stage: The Serpents

Divinday. From three o’clock in the afternoon until seven in the evening.

I had decided to engrave the bands. The customer had not asked for this either. I proposed it to her, and she agreed. A plain band is a plain band; an engraved band is the mark of a craftsman. It was my intention, I explained, that anyone who saw these caps should know at once that they had been made in my shop, and by my hand. It is a matter of commercial reputation.

The design I chose was a serpent biting its own tail. It is an old design, much used by silversmiths, and very suitable for a band, which is itself a circle without end. I engraved one serpent on each band, coiled around its whole circumference, with its head and its tail meeting at the front. I arranged them so that when the customer’s jaw was closed and the two fangs hung side by side, the two serpents would face each other across the gap between them, head to head. This was for symmetry. A pair of caps should match. The serpents on them should match. That is all it was.

I engraved them with my finest graver and the third lens of my goggles down. Each serpent had seventy-one scales along its length, two eyes, a forked tongue, and a mouth closed over the tip of its own tail. The work took four hours, two for each band.

Observations: When I had finished the second serpent I laid the two bands side by side on the cloth, as they would sit on the customer’s fangs, with the serpents facing each other. I examined them through the third lens. And I noticed that the serpents were facing each other very slightly more exactly than I had engraved them.

I mean this precisely. When I engraved them, I placed each serpent’s head at a point on its band that I had calculated in advance so that the two heads would be opposite each other when the bands sat side by side. My calculation was correct, but my engraving is not perfect. No engraving is. Each head was out of its calculated position by a very small amount, about one hundred and twenty-eighth of an inch, the left serpent to the left and the right to the right. Laid side by side, therefore, the two serpents should have been looking very slightly past each other.

They were not. They were looking straight at each other, exactly, without any error that I could detect at the full magnification of the third lens. I measured it three times. I record it. I attribute it to the contraction of the silver as it cooled after engraving, which may have pulled the heads very slightly round. That is a known effect, though I have never observed it before to that degree.

The customer, who had come out from behind the forge to look at the bands, said that the serpents looked like two old friends. I asked what she meant. She said they looked like two old friends who had nothing left to say to each other. I said that they were two engraved serpents, and had nothing to say to each other because they were engraved. She said, “Yes. That’s what I mean.” I did not understand her, and said so. She laughed. I went back to work.

The Seventh Stage: The Fitting of the Silver

Enchanday, the sixth day of the week of Darkness. Forty-four minutes past seven in the morning.

At forty-four minutes past seven on Enchanday, exactly twenty-two hours after I had laid the sheaths in the bath, I took the dish down from the high shelf and lifted the cloth.

The venom was gone.

I mean this precisely. The dish had held three fluid ounces of venom and a quarter ounce of crushed pumice when I laid the sheaths in it. It now held the quarter ounce of pumice, quite dry, lying in a thin pale film on the bottom of the dish, and the two sheaths, and nothing else. There was not a drop of liquid left. I had not uncovered the dish in the night except once, at midnight, briefly, to look at the glow. The shop had not been hot enough to evaporate three ounces of venom from a covered dish in twenty-two hours. I attribute it to absorption. Marine enamel, as I have said, is porous at the surface, and the sheaths must have taken it up into themselves. I have never known enamel absorb its own volume of venom in a single bath. These sheaths were not of the common sort.

I took them out of the dish and laid them on the cloth under the lamp.

They had changed color. They had been a pale clear green, somewhat translucent, like sea glass of the better quality. They were now a deeper green, and much clearer, so that the lamplight seemed to go into them and stay there. I record the color exactly, since it is one of the points on which I have since heard accounts grow fanciful. I will say that it was the green of seawater on a clear day, seen from a height, when the light of Helios is going straight down into it. I do not offer this as poetry. I offer it as the most exact comparison I can make.

They were also warm. Not slightly warm, as they had been when I held them in my hand. They were warm all through, like a stone that has lain all day in the sun.

I fitted the silver.

The tips went onto the points first. I seated them with a drop of hot solder and pressed them home with a small burnisher, and they fit as if they had been grown there. I have never achieved such a join between silver and enamel. I attribute it to the venom bath, which, as I said, alters the porosity of the surface for exactly this purpose. Then the bands, around the open ends, seated and soldered and burnished in the same way. When I had finished, each sheath was a single thing, enamel and silver, tip and band, and you could not have found the joins without the third lens.

I made the lacquer: the twenty-four grains of silver I had set aside, ground in my mortar to the finest dust, and mixed with a quarter ounce of mangrove sap, which I keep in a stoppered jar for the purpose. I brushed a thin coat of it over the whole of each sheath, the enamel and the silver together, with a brush of three hairs. It took one hour. I set them aside to dry overnight on the cloth under the lamp. The bezel in the left band I left open and unlacquered, to receive the crystal in the morning.

Observations: Enchanday was very cold, being the sixth day of the week of Darkness. At noon the great banded VaporSphere passed over the face of Helios, and the shop went dim and gray. I lit a second lamp. The customer lay behind the forge, close to its warmth, and did not move for some hours. I gave her at one o’clock the heel of my bread, which I was not going to eat, and a piece of dried fish I had in the cupboard, which was going stale. She ate them, slowly, on the left side of her mouth, away from the stump. I record this as a matter of household economy.

I record also that I did not eat on Enchanday at all, from four in the morning until Helios down. I did not notice this until Helios down. It is the first time in forty years that I have forgotten to eat. I attribute it to the press of the work.

And I record that at some point in the afternoon, while I was brushing on the lacquer, the customer said from behind the forge, “You really love this, don’t you.” I said that I did not know what she meant. She said, “The work. You love it. I can see it.” I said that I took a professional satisfaction in a commission well executed, as any craftsman does, and that love was not the word. She said, “What is the word, then?” I could not think of one. I said, “Hmph,” and went on with the lacquer.

The Eighth Stage: The Crystal

Illusday, the seventh and last day of the week of Darkness, and the last day of the month of Lathandus. Four o’clock in the morning.

The lacquer was dry. I examined both sheaths under the third lens. The surface was perfect, smooth, even, without a bubble or a run or a hair, from the point of the silver tip to the edge of the silver band. The engraved serpents on the bands looked at each other across the cloth. The scales on the enamel caught the light, darker toward the point. Behind the forge, the customer was asleep.

I had left the crystal to the last, as a jeweler leaves the stone to the last. I took down from the shelf above the forge the twist of paper. In it was the thirteenth crystal from the crystal-setter in Bell Street, the one I had bought in case one of the captain’s twelve should crack in the setting. I unwrapped it. It lay on my palm: small, dull, pale, the size and weight of a coin, eighty-four grains, the color of sea glass on the beach. Taken, the crystal-setter told me, from the skull of a reef eel.

I lowered the third lens and examined the bezel in the left band. It was a small round seat cut into the broader part of the inner face, a quarter of an inch deep, with a thin lip of silver standing up around its edge. When the crystal is set in the seat, the lip is pressed over it with a bezel pusher, a small blunt tool, all the way round, so that it closes over the edge of the crystal and holds it fast. It is set on the inner face of the band, where it will lie against the inside of the customer’s lip, and where her tongue can reach it. I set it there because the crystal, being a jar, should be where it can be filled easily, and the tongue is the most convenient part of a serpent for that purpose. That was my only reason.

I set the crystal in the seat. It fit exactly. I took up my bezel pusher and began to press the lip of silver over its edge, a little at a time, working round, as one presses the edge of a pie crust. Eleven presses to go once round. Then once round again, to tighten. Then once more with the burnisher, to smooth.

When I had finished, I sat back on my stool and looked at it.

And it did nothing.

I wish to record this with particular exactness, because it is the most important observation in the whole of this record.

Throughout this commission, every material I touched had behaved in some way that the reader may find remarkable, though I did not. The enamel would not be cut by a blade, and then ground for me in a quarter of the time it ought to have taken. The paste turned green. The venom cleared, and turned green, and glowed in the night like a breath, and vanished into the enamel. The shop smelled of the open sea with the wind off the land. The serpents on the bands turned themselves the last hundred-and-twenty-eighth of an inch to look each other in the eye. My tools glowed throughout. I attribute all of this to known and natural causes, and have said so.

But the crystal did nothing.

It did not glow. It did not grow warm. It did not hum when I whistled at it, though I tried every note I know. It did not change color. It sat in its seat on the inner face of the left band, small and dull and pale, the color of sea glass on the beach, eighty-four grains, exactly as it had sat in my palm when I took it from its twist of paper. It was a crystal, properly set, in a silver band, on an enamel cap. It was a jar, and it was empty, and that is all it was.

I sat on my stool for some time looking at it.

I record that I was relieved. It was the only thing in the whole commission that had behaved exactly as I said it would. It was an honest crystal, a battery, a thing of storing, like a jar. It held nothing, because nothing had been put into it. I had put no magic into it, nor into any part of the work, and here at last was the proof, sitting in its seat, dull and pale and doing nothing at all.

I record also, since I have promised exactness, that I was a little disappointed. I do not account for this. I record it.

The Ninth and Final Stage: The Fitting

Illusday. Eleven minutes past five in the morning.

I woke the customer. She came out from behind the forge, slowly, for it was still very cold. She rested her chin on the edge of my bench, as she had for the filing of the stump, and opened her mouth.

I fitted the left cap first, over the cracked fang. It slid on from the tip toward the root and seated against the gum with a small soft click. I checked it through the third lens. It sat on the fang like a thimble on a finger, without play or binding at any point. The crack in the fang was entirely covered and held fast. The silver band lay against the gum, flat and true, and the crystal on its inner face sat against the inside of her lip, where her tongue could reach it.

Then the right, the crown. It slid down over the filed stump and the empty space above it and seated on the stump with the same small soft click. With it seated, her right fang was whole again: four inches and nine-sixteenths from root to point, smooth and green and sharp, exactly matching the left. I checked that through the third lens as well. The two fangs were identical to the sixty-fourth of an inch, the two silver tips needle-sharp, the two bands flat and true. The two serpents on the bands looked at each other across the gap between them, head to head.

The customer closed her mouth.

She sat very still. Then she opened it again, and closed it, and opened it. She worked her jaw from side to side, slowly. She put her tongue to the crystal on the inner face of the left band, and held it there a moment, and took it away. She drew in a breath through her teeth. Then she lifted her head from the bench and looked at me with her gold eyes.

“They’re cool,” she said. Her voice was clear. The blur and the whistle were gone from it entirely. “They’re cool. Like rope. Like rope first thing in the morning, before the sun’s on it.”

“They are enamel and silver,” I said. “Enamel and silver are cool to the touch. It is a property of dense materials.”

She smiled. It was the first time I had seen her smile with her whole mouth, both fangs bare. She had been smiling only at one corner, around the broken stump, since she came into my shop dripping on my floor. The green caps and the silver tips caught the light of the lamp and gave it back.

I took off my goggles. I set them on the bench. I looked at her.

“There,” I said. “They are shoes for the teeth. They will not crack. That is the whole of it.”

She went on smiling at me.

“And if they do anything more,” I said, “it is not my fault.”

She laughed, her loud rattling laugh like a cart going over a bridge. Sabbet across the lane put her head out of the window again to see what the noise was, at five o’clock in the morning, on the last day of the month, in the cold of the week of Darkness.

Concluding Remarks

The commission was completed on Illusday, the seventh day of the week of Darkness, the last day of the month of Lathandus, 8612a, at twenty-nine minutes past five in the morning. Total time from the commencement of the work, including the venom bath, was two days and one hour and three minutes, against a schedule of two days and fourteen hours. Total materials consumed came to two ounces of silver, of which ninety-one grains were returned to stock; one tier-one crystal; three fluid ounces of reef venom; one quarter ounce of mangrove sap; and a quantity of pumice, sand, wax, and solder. The price agreed was eight silver, of which one copper has been paid and the remainder is due within one month, by contract.

I have recorded all observations exactly. None of them were remarkable. I put no magic in the work at any stage. The crystal, which is the only part of the work that anyone might suppose to be magical, did nothing at all, and this is in my opinion the conclusive proof.

I note for the record that I do not, in the ordinary way, record my own state of mind in my workshop records, as it is of no technical interest. I make an exception here only to correct any misapprehension the reader may have formed from the customer’s remarks. I did not love the work. I took a professional satisfaction in it, as any craftsman does in a commission of the first rank, well executed. I will say that it was the best work I have ever done, in forty-four years, since I first stood at my master’s bench and heard him whistle. I will say that while I did it, I forgot to eat, and forgot to sleep, and forgot to look at my clock. I forgot that the city in the clouds had passed over my shop four days before. I forgot the Gnomish Subscription Committee and my nephew Grenwick’s fingers and the price of pumice. I forgot everything except the enamel and the silver and the file in my hand. I will say that I whistled the whole time, a tune I had not whistled in forty-four years. And I will say that when it was finished, I sat on my stool in the gray cold of five o’clock in the morning and looked at the customer smiling with both fangs bare, and I felt a thing in my chest that I do not have a word for.

The customer suggested a word. I do not accept it. I have no other to offer.

She will climb tomorrow at Helios up, the first day of the month of Tyrus. She asked me if I would come and watch. I said that I had a great deal of work to do and could not spare the time.

I shall go. I shall stand at the back, where she will not see me. I shall take my goggles.

I put no magic in them. Magic is for people who cannot use a file.

• Segment 15: Illumination, the First Hang

It was dark when she woke, and she did not know at first where she was. Then she did, all at once, as one knows the shape of one’s own room in the dark before one’s eyes have opened. The warm stone floor under her coils. The smell of cold ashes and hot iron and pumice and mangrove sap. The slow soft breathing of the forge, banked for the night, the coals ticking as they cooled. Overhead, through the ceiling, faint and regular and absurdly comforting, the snoring of a gnome.

She lay there in the dark and did not move. She put her tongue, slowly, to the inside of her lip, and touched the crystal.

It was there. Small and smooth and cool, set in its silver seat on the inner face of the left band, exactly where it had been when she fell asleep, and where it had been when she woke in the night, and the time before that. She had woken many times in the night. Each time she had done this: put her tongue to the crystal, felt it, small and cool and there, and lain still again in the dark, with her heart going like a drum before the stop. Each time she had thought: tomorrow. Each time she had thought: what if they crack. What if they crack, like the other, at the top, with that sound like a pot breaking in the next house. What if I fall. And each time, beneath the fear, so deep she could hardly feel it, something else had stirred, warm and bright and bubbling, like laughter held in too long. She did not know which of them was stronger. She had lain in the dark and listened to them both.

Tomorrow. And now it was today.

The first day of the month of Tyrus. The first day of the week of Illumination. Conjursday. She said the names to herself in the dark, Tyrus, Illumination, Conjursday, as one says the words of a spell, or a prayer, or the order of an act before the band strikes up. Tyrus. The month of the god of justice, the old one had said, down in the blue dark at the edge of the deep, so that the bargain would be fair. Or because it was simply the next month. Both are true. Illumination: the week of the world brightening after the darkness. She had not known that until Tibbet told her, grumbling, over the venom bath, because she had asked. He knew the names of everything and the reasons for most of them, and despised all the reasons he did not like. Illumination. After the darkness, the light.

She uncoiled. Slowly, in the dark, turn by turn, the long ripple running down her from crest to tail, and she felt, as she did it, that it ran clean. All the way down, unbroken. The hurt was still there in places, in the bends of her where she had struck the yard and the sail and the deck; she would carry those for a while yet. But it no longer broke the ripple. She had eaten: Tibbet’s heel of bread, and the stale fish from his cupboard, and the tavern girl’s stew, and the grandmother’s silver fish, which had come every morning even to the gnome’s back step, wrapped in its damp kelp. She had slept warm three nights by the forge. And she was, she found, uncoiling in the dark, quite strong.

She went out through the shop without waking him. She went past the workbench with its tools laid out in rows and the jar of fine pumice on its high shelf, past the shelf above the door where the silver hare sat startled in the dark, and out into Ropewalk Lane. The cold struck her. It was cold still, though the week of Darkness was over, cold and still and smelling of frost and smoke and the sea. Overhead the sky was black, with the stars thick and sharp in it like grains of salt spilled on a dark cloth. Low in the west the great banded world hung huge and pale, setting. In the east, out over the harbor, there was the faintest gray at the edge of things.

She went down to the water.

She went flowing, smoothly, beautifully, down Ropewalk Lane and along Wharf Street and out onto the central wharf. The boards were white with frost and her scales left a long dark curving track in it behind her. The track went on and on, and she looked back at it once over her shoulder and laughed, softly, for no reason, because it was so long and so curved and so plainly hers.

He was waiting at the foot of the gangplank of the Prosperous Aunt. Mister Larkspur, the mate. Iron gray, lean, one tusk broken off short, leaning on the rail with a splinter in his teeth and the ship’s articles under his arm, as if he had been there all night. Perhaps he had.

“Morning, Hand,” he said, in his long slow dry voice.

“Morning, Mister Larkspur.”

“You’re signed on for the month,” he said. “One copper a day. Forty-nine copper, payable at the end. Ship’s laid up in port for her refit and won’t sail before Ilmatus, so you’ll have her mast all month. That’s the business of the ship, as far as the harbor master’s concerned.” He took the splinter out of his mouth and looked at it. “He came round last night. To the ship. Asked to see the articles. Read them twice, front to back. Didn’t say a word. Then he folded his arms and went away.”

“Did he?”

“He did.” Mister Larkspur put the splinter back. “I’ve been in and out of this harbor twenty-two years, and I’ve never seen that man not say a word. Thought you should know.”

She did not know what to say to that, so she said nothing. Mister Larkspur nodded once, as if that were the right answer, and stood aside, and she went up the gangplank onto the deck.

Then she looked up.

And there it was. The mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt, standing up black against the graying sky. The main yard, and the main top, and the topmast above it, and the topsail yard and the topgallant yard, and at the very top, the truck, a small round black dot against the paling dark. Running up to it through its block and down again, swaying, barely visible, the signal halyard, a thin dark line hanging in the cold still air. A hundred and forty feet. She had climbed it once. She had fallen from it once. She stood on the deck at the foot of it, on the very place, she thought, where she had struck, and looked up at it, and something in her went cold and small and frightened, as it had in the dark of the night. It was the old woman in the narrow bed above the bakery, with her false teeth in a glass. The teeth go first, little lark. The teeth go first.

She put her tongue to the crystal.

Small and smooth and cool. Like rope, first thing in the morning, before the sun is on it. There.

And the cold small frightened thing went quiet, and the other thing, the warm bright bubbling thing, came up instead. She laughed, out loud, on the deck of the Prosperous Aunt in the gray before dawn, and Mister Larkspur, at the rail, raised one iron-gray eyebrow.

There was a crowd. Of course there was a crowd. She had not noticed it at first, she had been looking up. But now, as the gray grew in the east and the shapes on the wharf came clearer, she saw them: the dockhands and the porters and the fishwives, the carters and the children, gathering along the wharf in the cold with their breath going up in clouds. More were coming. She could hear them on the boards, a steady drumming of feet and voices, and the sailors of the Prosperous Aunt and the ships on either side were coming up out of the hatches and into the rigging to watch. They were laughing already. She could hear them.

“She’s back!”

“The serpent’s back! Mind the deck, lads!”

“Somebody fetch a sack! Somebody fetch a sack of grain, so she’s got something to land on!”

“Two copper says she don’t reach the main top!”

That was a red round quivering man in a fur coat on the wharf, waving a fistful of coins, and a small sharp otter-folk woman beside him hit him on the arm and said something she could not hear.

And the laughter came up off the wharf and out of the rigging, loud and rough and cheerful and not quite kind, and she remembered it. She remembered it from the morning she had tangled herself in the ratlines and hung there like a knotted rope with her tail flailing, and the whole harbor had howled. She remembered it from after, when she lay on the deck with her health run out of her and her tooth broken, and the laughter had come again, high and thin and strange. She heard it now, and she could have gone small and cold again. But she did not.

Because she knew that sound.

It was the sound of the crowd before the act. It was the sound of the benches filling in the tent on a fair-day night, when the farmers came in from the country with their wives and children, all their talk and their laughter and their calling to one another across the tiers. The laughter was not for you. It was not yet for anything. It was only the noise a crowd makes when it has come to see something and does not yet know what it is going to see. She had heard it every night of her life, every night of the long years in the tent, from the platform at the top of the king pole. She had stood there in her silver spangles and looked down at all those faces laughing and talking and eating their sugar clouds, and waited for the lamps to go down and the band to strike up and the noise to stop. It always stopped. Always. It stopped all at once, as if someone had closed a door on it, and then there was the silence, the great held silence of a thousand people not breathing. And then it was yours.

She looked at the laughing faces along the wharf in the gray light, the dockhands, the fishwives, the children. And she smiled at them, wide and slow and shining, with both her new green fangs bare.

She saw, then, among the faces, the ones she knew.

The big freckled lizard-folk woman from the Gull’s Daughter, Merran, the one who had given her the first herring and the fishy blanket. She stood with her arms crossed, not laughing, and beside her the uncle who had been drenched, Brek, wrapped in a coat to his ears. The gap-toothed tavern girl in her apron, with a shawl over her head, holding her own elbows against the cold. The long thin heron-folk boy who had run for the harbor master, hopping from one foot to another, flapping. The young sailor. The young freckle-faced sunburnt sailor from the Prosperous Aunt who had brought her the cup, and had sat beside her three days on the old sea wall and said nothing at all. He was in the rigging with the others, on the main yard, but he was not laughing either. He was looking at her. His face was white under the freckles.

Jory, she thought. His name was Jory. He had told her that on the second day, on the sea wall, the only thing he had said in all those hours. Jory.

And at the back of the crowd, half hidden behind a stack of crates by the warehouse wall, small and cross and pretending not to be there, with brass goggles pushed up on his bald freckled forehead and his arms folded, a gnome. He was whistling.

She did not see the harbor master. She looked for him and did not see him. Then, at the very moment she stopped looking, the bruise-blue door of the harbor office at the landward end of the central wharf opened. A short broad figure came out into the gray light, with a black hat and a white beard and two rows of brass buttons. It stood on the step, and folded its arms.

And far, far off, at the very end of the farthest wharf, on the last piling, too far to see clearly, so far that it was only a small dark hump against the paling sea, there was something mossy and still. She thought it was looking at her. She could not be sure.

She turned to the mast.

She did not climb the ratlines. She had learned that, at least. She went to the foot of the mast and put her hands on it, on the cold pale wood with the frost on it, and then she coiled. She wound herself round it, turn upon turn, the long green spiral of her going up the mast like a stripe on a barber’s pole. She reached up with her arms and pulled, and squeezed with her coils and pushed, and drew herself upward.

And the laughter on the wharf rose to a howl.

She heard it. She heard someone shout, she’s at it again, like a sock up a broom handle! and the whole crowd shrieked and roared and slapped each other on the back. The sailors in the rigging hooted and whistled and banged on the yards with their fists. The red round man in the fur coat was crying with laughter and could not take bets. She heard it all, and she went on climbing, and she found, to her surprise, that she was laughing too. It was funny. It was very funny. A serpent climbing a mast like a sock up a broom handle. She would have laughed at it herself, from the benches, with a sugar cloud in her hand. She laughed now, climbing, with her cheek against the frosty wood and her coils going round and round. Every time the crowd roared she laughed again. The frost crumbled under her scales and fell glittering on the deck.

She reached the main top and coiled herself over the lip of it and lay there a moment, breathing. The crowd cheered, mocking, and clapped. She raised one hand and waved to them, as one waves from the platform, a grand slow sweep of the arm. They howled again. She laughed. She went on.

Up the topmast. Past the topsail yard. Past the topgallant yard, where she had struck. She felt it go by under her coils, the hard round spar, and something in her flinched. She did not stop. She went on, round and round and up, smoothly now, the long ripple running clean, and the laughter on the wharf was getting smaller. It was getting farther away. It was not that it had stopped. It was that she was higher. A hundred feet. A hundred and twenty. She could hear the wind in the rigging, the hum of it, rising and falling, and the creak of the mast as it swayed, and her own breath. And the laughter was so far below her now that it sounded like the sea.

She reached the top.

The truck. The small round cap of wood at the very peak of the mast, a hundred and forty feet above the deck. She coiled herself round the mast just beneath it, as she had before, and held on with her arms. She did not look down. Not yet. She looked out.

And the light was coming.

She had not known. She had not thought. She had climbed in the gray before dawn because that was when the old one had said, at Helios up. She had thought of the old one and the bargain and the forty-nine days, of the teeth and the fall and the crack and the crystal. She had not once thought, in all of that, that she would be up here, at the very top, at the very moment Helios came up.

It was coming up now. Out there, beyond the breakwater and the reef, at the edge of the eastern sea, where the gray had gone to pink and the pink to gold. She saw the top of it come up out of the water, round and bright and dripping. She saw the rest of it come heaving up after, slowly, clumsily, as if the sea did not want to let it go. And then, at last, sitting on the very edge of the water, it shook itself. It did. She saw it. A great shiver from end to end. The gold flew off it in every direction and landed on the waves in a thousand bright splashes, so that the whole sea was spattered with light, from the edge of the world to the foot of the breakwater, and the whole sky went up gold.

Like a wet dog. Like a wet dog climbing out of a pond. She laughed so hard she nearly lost her grip on the mast.

Somebody had told her that. Somebody, sometime, in the days of the forgetting sickness, on the wharf, an old voice, had said: Helios comes up like a wet dog, child, go and look for yourself. And she had not. She had been asleep, or lost, or crying in the nets, every morning, and she had not looked. And now she was looking, from the very top of the tallest mast in the harbor, and it was true. It was true.

She took the halyard in her hand.

The thin dark line, hanging from the block at the peak, swaying in the cold still air beside her. She drew it toward her. It was rough and stiff with frost and tar, and cold, so cold. Cold as her new teeth. Cold like rope first thing in the morning, before the sun is on it.

She put it in her mouth.

She closed her teeth on it.

She felt it go between them, the new green fangs and the silver tips like needles, and the long jaw behind them. She felt it settle there, the rope, between the left fang and the right, in the place that seemed to have been made for it. She felt her jaw close on it, slowly, and the muscles of her cheeks bunch beneath the scales, coiled and waiting, like a spring. She tasted it. Tar and salt and frost and wind. And something else, very faint, very far away, beneath it: the clean cold taste of open water, far out beyond the reef, where the light gives up. She did not know where that came from. She did not ask.

The teeth go first, little lark.

Not these. Not these.

She let go with her hands.

The crowd below, very far away, made a sound. It was not laughter. It was a breath, a single long breath drawn in by a great many people at once, so that it came up even to the top of the mast like a gust of wind.

She let go with her arms, and spread them wide on either side of her, as her mother used to, as she used to, palms down, fingers spread, at the top of the king pole in the lamplight with the spangles throwing the light back. And she began, slowly, turn by turn, to uncoil her body from the mast.

Below her the sound had stopped. All the sound had stopped. The laughter, the shouting, the hooting and banging and calling, all of it. It had stopped all at once, as if someone had closed a door on it. There was only the wind in the rigging, and the creak of the mast, and the faint far slap of the water on the hull a hundred and forty feet below. There was the silence. The great held silence of a whole harbor not breathing.

It was hers.

She let the last coil of her tail slide off the mast.

And she hung.

By her teeth. By her teeth alone, on a single thin halyard, a hundred and forty feet above the deck of the Prosperous Aunt, in the first gold light of Helios over the harbor of Saltcoil. Her long body hung straight down beneath her like a ribbon, like a rope, like a plumb line dropped from heaven. Her arms were spread wide. The whole weight of her hung from the rope, and the rope hung from her jaw, and her jaw held.

It held.

She felt it. She felt the whole weight of herself come down through her teeth, through the green caps and the silver bands, into the long jaw and the skull and down the spine. It was the jolt she remembered, the shock running up through the jaw and down to the very tip of her tail. She waited for the crack. She waited, with every scale of her, every nerve, for the small sharp sound like a pot breaking in the next house. For the sudden jerk and the slip and the long cold drop.

It did not come.

The shoes did not crack.

She hung there and they held, the old one’s shed teeth on her new ones, cool and smooth and perfect, the gnome’s silver tight and true. The two engraved serpents faced each other across the rope between her fangs, head to head, as if they were holding it too. She held, and the rope held, and the teeth held, and she did not fall.

Oh.

Oh.

She began to spin.

She did not decide to. Her body did it, as her body had done the coiling and the eating and the ripple, as if it remembered. The halyard had no swivel; it was not that kind of rope. But she gave a small twist of her long body, from the shoulders, a little turn, the way her mother used to give a little turn of the hips to start it. The halyard twisted with her, and she turned, slowly, once around. The harbor wheeled past her: the wharves and the warehouses and the masts, the roofs of the city going up the hill, the hills beyond with the frost on them, the sea. Then the halyard untwisted and she turned back the other way, and then, with another small twist, around again, faster. And again. And again, faster still, until it was not turning any longer but spinning. She was a seed spinning as it falls from the tree in autumn, turning and turning in the gold air, and the whole world went streaming past her in long bright bands of light.

She was laughing. She could not help it. With her teeth clamped tight on the rope and her mouth closed she could not laugh aloud. But it came up in her anyway, all the way from the bottom of her long chest. It shook her whole body. It came out of her nose in snorts and out of her throat in a hum, a long rising humming laugh that went on and on as she spun. Somewhere behind it, very far off, she thought she heard a drum, beating faster and faster.

And then she stopped.

At the very top of the spin, at the very fastest, she stopped. She did not know how. She threw her arms out wide, wider than before, and arched her long body. The spinning caught in her and held, and she hung there, perfectly still, at the top of the mast with her arms flung wide and her face turned up to the gold sky. The drum stopped. The world stopped. The silence was so great that she could hear her own heart.

And she looked down.

She had not looked down before. She had been afraid to. She looked down now, from the top of the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt, a hundred and forty feet above the deck, with the first light of Helios spattered gold across everything. She saw.

She saw the harbor. The whole of it, spread out below her, laid out flat as a painting on a table. It was round. She had never known it was round. From the wharves it had always seemed only a stretch of water between the boats and the breakwater. But from up here it was round, a great round bowl of water held between the arms of the land and the long stone arm of the breakwater. The water in it was green. Not gray, as it had always looked from the wharf in the week of Darkness. Green, a clear deep green, with the light going down into it. All round the edges of it, where it met the wharves and the sea wall and the breakwater and the rocks, there was a thin white line of foam, like the white rim of a bowl.

She saw the boats. The fishing boats moored at the farthest wharf, thirty of them, small and patched and bright. The trade ships at the inner wharves, deep-bellied and tall. The little skiffs and dinghies tied up everywhere. From up here they were tiny. They were small and round and scattered over the green water like seeds, like seeds floating on the top of a bowl of soup, drifting a little on their lines in the morning swell.

And she saw the people. On the deck below her, on the wharf, in the rigging, at the rails. All the dockhands and fishwives and sailors and children, all the people who had laughed. They had stopped laughing. They were standing quite still, every one of them, with their heads tipped back and their faces turned up to her. Their mouths were open. All of them. Small and round and open, every face, all along the wharf, gaping up at her like little fish in a pool when you lean over the edge.

She closed her mouth tighter on the rope. And she spoke.

She did not know if it would work. She did not know how the old one could hear her, so far down in the dark where the light gives up. She did not know whether a fang really does know the fang it came from, or whether that was only something a monster of the reef says, as a grandmother says a price and walks away. But she had promised. And so, with her teeth clamped tight on the halyard and her lips pressed shut around it, she spoke through her closed mouth, low and humming, the words coming out of her as a hum comes out of a bell, down through the teeth into the caps, the old one’s caps, into the green enamel and the silver and the crystal:

“I see the water,” she said, “like a green bowl with white edges.”

The wind blew. The mast creaked.

“I see the boats,” she said, “like seeds floating in soup.”

Far below, on the deck, a young sailor with freckles took off his cap and held it against his chest.

“I see the sailors,” she said, and the laugh came up in her again, she could not stop it, it shook the words as they came out, “with their mouths open. Like little fish.”

And then, because she could not help it, because Helios had just climbed out of the sea and shaken itself and nobody else in the whole harbor had seen it:

“And I saw Helios come up,” she said. “Like a wet dog. It shook. It really shook. You should have seen it.”

And then she was quiet, and hung there, with her arms spread, and the gold light on her, waiting.

She did not know what she was waiting for. A voice, perhaps. An answer. Something to tell her the old one had heard. There was nothing. Only the wind and the creak of the mast and the slap of the water far below. And the silence of the whole harbor with its mouths open.

And then, very faint, so faint that she was never afterwards sure she had not imagined it, there was something in her teeth.

It was not a sound. It was a warmth. A small warmth, very slight, in the roots of the green caps where they met her own fangs. A faint low hum, like the hum of the wind in the rigging, or the note a bell makes long after it has been struck. It was there for a moment, a single breath, no more. Then it was gone.

She did not know what it was. She told herself it was the sun, coming up and warming the silver. She told herself it was her own heart. She told herself many things.

But she knew. Somewhere far down below the reef, coiled around a black rock in the deep, something old had heard her. And it was glad.

The silence broke.

It did not break all at once. It broke as ice breaks on a pond in spring, a crack here and a crack there, and then all of it at once. Somebody on the wharf, a child, she thought, said, “Oh!” high and thin. And somebody else said, “Look at her,” and somebody else, a man’s voice, rough, said something she could not hear. Then a sailor in the rigging of the next ship over took off his cap and flung it into the air, and shouted, a great wordless shout. And then they were all shouting.

All of them. The whole wharf, the whole harbor. The dockhands and the porters and the fishwives, the sailors in the rigging and at the rails, the children, the red round man in the fur coat with his coins. The sound came up off the wharf and out of the rigging like a wave breaking, like a storm on a tin roof, like a flock of birds rising all at once from a field. It came up and up, all the way to the top of the mast, so that she felt the halyard tremble with it between her teeth. They were throwing their voices up at her. Like flowers. Like a whole field of flowers thrown up into the air.

And something else came up too. Something small and bright, glinting in the gold light, turning over and over as it rose, and falling back.

Coins.

They were throwing coins. She saw them go up from the wharf, from the deck, from the rigging, a few at first and then more, a glittering shower of small bright things flung up into the light. They could not throw them high enough, of course. Nobody could throw a coin a hundred and forty feet. They went up and turned over in the gold air and fell back again onto the deck of the Prosperous Aunt. They rang on the oak like hail, like a hundred small bells, copper and nickel and here and there a silver. The deck was bright with them. And still they threw. Merran threw, and the tavern girl, and the heron-folk boy, flapping. Mister Larkspur at the rail, she saw, very deliberately, with no expression on his face at all, took a coin from his pocket, flipped it into the air, caught it, and flipped it again, up, toward her. The red round man in the fur coat threw a whole fistful, the coins he had been betting with, and the small sharp otter woman beside him hit him on the arm and then threw a fistful of her own.

And at the back of the crowd, behind the stack of crates by the warehouse wall, she saw a small cross gnome with brass goggles on his forehead. He had unfolded his arms. He had taken a single coin from his apron pocket, and he was looking at it as if it had personally insulted him. Then he threw it. He threw it very hard, and very high, much higher than anyone else’s. It went up nearly to the main top before it turned over in the gold air and fell.

And up on the step of the harbor office, at the landward end of the central wharf, the short broad figure with the black hat and the brass buttons stood with its arms still folded. It did not throw anything. It did not shout. It stood there, quite still, looking up at her. She could not see its face from so far away. But she saw it, as she spun slowly round on the end of the halyard in the gold light, take one hand from its folded arms, and lift it, and touch the brim of its black oilskin hat.

Only touch it. It did not take it off. Only touched it, once, the way a man touches his hat to a lady in the street, or to a ship going out. And then the hand went back, and the arms folded again.

She laughed so hard she very nearly let go of the rope.

She came down. Slowly, carefully, the way she had come up, coiling herself back round the mast before she let go of the halyard with her teeth, and then going down turn by turn, the long green spiral unwinding. The shouting went on below her the whole way. It was still going on when she reached the deck, so loud that she could not hear herself breathe. She came down off the mast onto the oak deck, onto the very place where she had struck a week before, and there were coins everywhere, under her, around her, bright on the wood. Her body was shaking. Her jaw ached, a deep good ache, all the way back to the hinges. Her arms ached and her back ached and every bend of her ached, and she could not stop laughing.

Jory came down out of the rigging, the young sailor. He came across the deck to her and stopped and stood there a moment with his cap in his hands and his face red under the freckles. Then he knelt down, without a word, and began to gather up the coins. He picked them up one by one off the deck and put them in his cap, carefully, all of them, the copper and the nickel and the silver. When he had gathered them all he held out the cap to her.

She looked at it. It was full. It was fuller than she had ever imagined a cap could be.

“For the gnome,” she said, and her voice was clear and strong, with no blur in it and no whistle. And then she laughed again, and could not stop. She sat there on the deck of the Prosperous Aunt in the first gold light of the first day of the month of Tyrus. Her fangs were green and whole and her arms were around a young sailor’s cap full of coins. The harbor was shouting all around her. Helios was climbing up into the sky above the reef, quite dry, pretending nothing had happened. And she laughed, and laughed, and laughed. It was the laugh of a woman who had fallen and had climbed again and had not fallen, and who could not, for the life of her, for either of her lives, believe it.

One, she thought. One.

Forty-eight to go.

• Segment 16: Arms Folded Against the Sky

There are two kinds of men in the world who keep ledgers, and the reader will very likely have met both.

The first kind keeps a ledger because he must. His master requires it, or his trade, or the law, and he enters in it what he is bound to enter and not one word more. He closes it at the end of the day with a sigh of relief and does not think of it again until the next morning. Quillimore Drabb, the clerk, was of this kind, and a very good example of it.

The second kind keeps a ledger because he cannot help it. He believes, in the very marrow of his bones, that a thing which has not been written down has not properly happened. He believes that the world is held together by records, as a ship is held together by its nails, and that if the records were ever to fail, the whole of creation would come apart at the seams and go down into the sea. Such a man does not close his ledger with relief. He closes it with reluctance, and opens it again at the first opportunity, and enters things in it that nobody has asked him to enter. He enters them in the margins, in very small writing, where he supposes nobody will look.

Old Dunmoor Saltbeard was of the second kind.

It must therefore be understood that what follows was never meant to be read. It was written in the margin of the green canvas Ledger of Arrivals for the month of Tyrus, 8612a. It sat in the narrow strip at the right-hand edge of each page, where there was no column and no heading and no rule, beside the entries for the trade ships and the fishing smacks and the pleasure barges and the ketches from the cold islands to the north. It was written in the small square upright hand of the harbor master, a little less steady than usual. It was written for nobody. And the reader is asked to bear in mind, in reading it, that its author would have denied, on his oath and under any pressure whatsoever, that he had ever written a word of it.

8612a3.1.1. Conjursday. Illumination.

Serpent woman. Climbed main of P. Aunt at Helios up. Hung by teeth at truck. Spun. Did not fall. Coins thrown. I disapprove.

That was all. He had written it at a quarter past six, sitting on his high stool, having returned to his office from the step where he had stood, he told himself, merely to observe the condition of the harbor at Helios up, as was his duty. He had written it very quickly and blotted it at once and closed the ledger. He had folded his arms, and looked out of the small round window at the harbor, and found that his right hand was trembling slightly. He attributed this to the cold.

It had not escaped his notice, nor the notice of half the harbor, that at the moment the serpent woman hung there spinning with her arms spread, he had touched his hat. He had not removed it. He wished that to be understood. He had touched it. It was, he would have said if asked, a perfectly ordinary adjustment of a hat in a wind. There had been a wind. There is always a wind in the harbor of Saltcoil. A man may adjust his hat in a wind without anybody making anything of it.

Nobody asked him. But Quillimore Drabb, coming in at half past five that morning and finding the office empty and the stove unlit for the first time in nineteen years, had gone to the door and looked out. He had seen. And Quillimore Drabb, hanging his thin coat on the fourth hook from the left and sighing at the cold, said nothing whatever about it. That was perhaps the kindest thing anyone did for the harbor master that month.

8612a3.1.2. Evoday. Illumination.

Serpent woman. Climbed again at Helios up. Same mast. Same halyard. Hung, spun, did not fall. Mouth closed throughout. Appeared to speak, or hum, while hanging. Larger crowd than yesterday. Coins thrown, more than yesterday. Fettle taking bets on wharf. Spoke to him. I disapprove.

He had spoken to Mister Ambrose Fettle, of Fettle and Fettle, Dealers in Salt and Sundries, a little after Helios up. Mister Fettle had set up a small folding table on the central wharf, near the foot of the gangplank of the Prosperous Aunt, with a slate on it and a stick of chalk and a tin box for the money. On the slate, in large wobbling letters, were the words: THE SERPENT. WILL SHE FALL? ODDS GIVEN.

“Mister Fettle,” said the harbor master.

“Harbor Master!” cried Mister Fettle, quivering. “Good morning to you, sir! A fine morning, a very fine morning! Will you take a wager, sir? Even money she’s off by the end of the week, three to one by the end of the month, ten to one she don’t fall at all, which I may say is very generous odds, sir, very generous indeed, for the house is taking a great risk—”

“There is no gaming on harbor property,” said the harbor master.

Mister Fettle’s quivering stopped. “No gaming, sir?”

“No gaming. Nor wagering. Nor bookmaking of any description. Upon any wharf, quay, jetty, pier, landing, or other property of the harbor of Saltcoil. That is the rule. It has been the rule for thirty-three years, since the affair of the crab races.” He folded his arms. “You will remove your table, Mister Fettle. Your slate. Your chalk. And your tin box.”

Mister Fettle looked at his table. He looked at the harbor master. He looked at the crowd gathering along the wharf to watch the serpent woman climb. Then something came into his small bright eyes, something sly and quick, like a fish darting under a rock.

“Upon harbor property, sir,” he said. “That’s the rule?”

“Upon harbor property.”

“And Wharf Street, sir?” said Mister Fettle. “The cobbles of Wharf Street, at the landward end of the central wharf, directly in front of your own office door? That’s not harbor property, I think, sir. That’s the city’s.”

The harbor master was silent a moment.

“That is the city’s,” he said.

So Mister Fettle picked up his folding table and his slate and his chalk and his tin box and carried them twenty yards up the central wharf. He set them down on the cobbles of Wharf Street, directly in front of the bruise-blue door of the harbor office, so close that the harbor master, opening his door the next morning, would very nearly strike the slate with it. And there he took wagers for the rest of the month.

The harbor master watched him do it. He watched, with his arms folded, and said nothing. Then he went inside and wrote I disapprove in the margin of the ledger. Whether he meant the bookmaking or the serpent woman or himself, the record does not say.

8612a3.1.3. Abjursday. Illumination.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Third day. Crowd now perhaps two hundred. Fettle’s book doing a brisk trade on Wharf St. Odds on a fall by end of week now two to one. The Pellingworth woman wagered four copper she will fall today. Lost. Coins thrown. Larkspur tells me serpent pays gnome Gearwhistle of Ropewalk Lane from the coins, in installments, by contract. Considered whether coins thrown at a performer upon a vessel moored in harbor constitute income from a sale within city limits and so taxable at three per centum. Consulted the Ledger of Fees. Found no line. Consulted the Statutes of the Harbor of Saltcoil, all four volumes. Found no line. Concluded coins are a gift, not a sale, and not taxable. Am not pleased with this conclusion but it is the law. I disapprove.

The reader may smile at the harbor master’s three hours with the Statutes of the Harbor of Saltcoil, all four volumes, bound in green leather. They were so swollen with the damp that each one had to be pried open with a paper knife. He went through them line by line, with his finger, while Quillimore Drabb held the lamp. But the reader should consider what was in his mind as he did it. For the harbor master was not, whatever his clerk may have supposed, looking for a way to tax the serpent woman. He was looking for a line.

He had always found a line. In forty-seven years upon the high stool there had never been a thing in the harbor of Saltcoil for which, if he looked hard enough, he could not find a line, a rule, a statute, a precedent. Some column in some ledger set down long ago by some careful man, which said: this is what this thing is, and this is where it belongs, and this is what must be done about it. That was what the ledgers were for. That was what the rules were for. They were the wall. Every brick of it was a line in a ledger, and every line in a ledger was a place where some disordered and dangerous thing had been caught and named and fixed and made safe.

There was no line for a serpent woman hanging by her teeth from the main truck of the Prosperous Aunt. There was no line for the coins.

He closed the fourth volume of the Statutes and sat for some time with his arms folded and his hand resting on the swollen green leather. Quillimore Drabb, holding the lamp, thought he had never seen the harbor master look so much like a man who has walked out of his own house and cannot find the way back.

8612a3.1.4. Transmuday. Illumination.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Fourth day. Observed today, from my step, that she does not merely hang. At the top of the spin she stops, and spreads her arms, and looks down. Holds the stillness some moments. During this the whole wharf goes quiet. I have seen nothing like it in forty-seven years of keeping this harbor. Crowd now three hundred or more. Hot-nut seller from Bell St has set up a brazier at the foot of the central wharf and is doing a great trade, on harbor property, without license. Spoke to him. He moved to Wharf St beside Fettle. Merran of the Gull’s Daughter came with her uncle Brek, who was awake at Helios up for the first time in living memory. Dockhand Weatherby has appointed himself crier and runs the length of the wharf at Helios up shouting she’s going up, she’s going up! I have told him that crying is not among his duties. He says he does it on his own time. Coins thrown. A great many. I disapprove.

On the fourth morning the harbor master did not merely stand upon his step. He came down from it.

He did not mean to. He would have said, if asked, that he came down to speak to the hot-nut seller from Bell Street. That was a large, sweating, cheerful man named Dobbin Thrupp, who had set up his brazier at the foot of the central wharf at four o’clock that morning. He was roasting chestnuts and hazelnuts and the little sweet sea-almonds of Lapita, and selling them in paper twists at a copper apiece to the crowd waiting in the cold for Helios. That was why the harbor master came down, and he did speak to Mister Thrupp, briefly and firmly, about licenses. Mister Thrupp moved his brazier, cheerfully, to the cobbles of Wharf Street, beside Mister Fettle’s table.

But having come down from his step, the harbor master did not go back up it. He stood at the foot of the central wharf, with his arms folded, and watched.

He watched the serpent woman come flowing down Ropewalk Lane in the gray before dawn, smooth and green and quick. She went along the wharf to the Prosperous Aunt, with the crowd parting before her and some of them, he noticed, calling out to her now by name: Velisse! Good morning, Velisse! He watched her go up the gangplank and nod to Mister Larkspur, who was waiting at the rail with his splinter in his teeth. He watched her go to the foot of the mainmast and lay her hands on it and look up. He watched her coil.

And he watched the crowd laugh.

They still laughed. They laughed every morning at the coiling, at the long green spiral going up the mast like a stripe on a barber’s pole, like a sock up a broom handle. But it was a different laugh from the one he remembered, the one he had laughed himself, on the morning of the fall. It was a fond laugh now, a laugh that knew what was coming and was glad of it, the way an audience laughs at the clown before the main act. Somebody would shout, there she goes, the old sock! and everybody would roar. And she would laugh too, up there on the mast, with her cheek against the wood. The harbor master could hear her, a loud rattling laugh like a cart going over a bridge. And when she reached the main top she would wave to them, a grand slow sweep of the arm, and they would cheer.

And then she would go on up, past the topsail yard and the topgallant yard, round and round and up. And the laughter would grow quieter. And at the top she would take the halyard in her teeth and let go.

The harbor master had not watched this part from the foot of the wharf before. From his step it had been far off, a small green figure at the top of a mast. From the foot of the wharf, with his head tipped back and his hat brim pushed up and his squinted eye fixed on her, it was something else entirely. He saw her hang. He saw her arms spread and her long body hang straight down beneath her like a plumb line. He saw her begin to turn, slowly, and then faster, and faster, until she was a green blur at the top of the mast with the light streaming off her. He saw her stop. He saw the stillness. And he heard the silence come down over the whole wharf, over three hundred people, all at once, as if someone had closed a door. He stood in it with his arms folded and his head tipped back, and did not breathe, and did not know that he was not breathing, until she began to come down again and the crowd began to shout and he found that his chest hurt.

He went back up to his office then, very quickly, without speaking to anybody, and wrote the longest entry yet. When Quillimore Drabb came in at half past five he found the harbor master on his high stool with his arms folded so tightly that his buttons creaked, looking out of the small round window at nothing.

“Good morning, sir,” sighed Drabb.

“Clerk,” said the harbor master. “I disapprove.”

“Yes, sir,” said Drabb.

8612a3.1.5. Divinday. Illumination.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Fifth day. Inspected the signal halyard of the P. Aunt this morning before she climbed, at my own request, under my authority to inspect gear aboard any vessel moored in harbor for the safety of the port. Found it old hemp, sound but worn, fraying at the block. Ordered Larkspur to replace it before tomorrow with new line, of the best manila, at the ship’s cost, as business of the ship. Larkspur looked at me a long while and then said aye, sir. Did not ask why. I would have told him: for the safety of the port. A frayed halyard at the truck of the tallest mast in the harbor is a hazard to every vessel moored beneath it. That is all. Crowd now near four hundred. Captain Vask of the Frostwind came to watch. Stood beside me at the foot of the wharf, shivering. Said nothing until she stopped at the top of the spin and spread her arms. Then he said, quite softly, to nobody, in his cold-world voice, we had a woman like that in the circus at Varnholm when I was a boy. Then he said nothing more. Coins thrown. I disapprove.

8612a3.1.6. Enchanday. Illumination.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Sixth day. New halyard rove at the truck by Larkspur’s riggers yesterday afternoon. Inspected it myself at four this morning, climbing to the main top to look at the block. I have not been aloft in eleven years and do not intend to be again. My knees are not what they were. The halyard is sound. She took it in her teeth this morning and hung from it and it held. I watched from the foot of the wharf, as yesterday. I do not know why I did not watch from my step. It is a better view from the step. Also: noted that at the top of the spin, when she stops and looks down, her lips move. She speaks. Through her teeth, with her mouth closed upon the halyard. I could not hear what she said. Nobody can. The sailors say she is praying. The fishwives say she is talking to the fish. Weatherby says she is counting. I do not know. Also: the Widow Pellingworth has wagered against her every day this week and lost every day. Today she wagered four copper on her, to go the whole month without a fall, at Fettle’s odds of ten to one. When I asked her why she had changed sides she said, because I’m tired of losing, Harbor Master, and because look at her. I did not answer. Coins thrown. I disapprove.

8612a3.1.7. Illusday. Illumination. Last day of the week.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Seventh day. One week. Seven days without a fall. I had not thought she would last three. The crowd cheered for some minutes when she came down. Fettle shortened his odds on a fall by the end of the month from three to one to two to one, which in my experience means he is afraid of losing. Coins thrown, so many that the deck of the P. Aunt was covered from the mainmast to the rail, and the young sailor, Jory Penhallow, ordinary seaman, who gathers them for her every morning in his cap, needed three caps today. Also: a thing I must record. This afternoon, at a little past three, Weatherby came to the office at a run to say that there were children in Tanner’s Yard behind Bell St hanging from a washing line by their teeth. Went at once. Found six of them, the oldest perhaps ten. None of them come to their magic. Hanging from a line strung between two posts, four feet off the cobbles, biting it and letting go with their hands and dangling, while the others counted and cheered. Ordered them down. Most came down. The smallest, a lizard-folk girl of about seven, would not let go and could not hold on, and fell, and struck her chin on the cobbles, and cut it, and screamed. I picked her up. She was not badly hurt. But I stood in Tanner’s Yard with her bleeding on my coat and I could not for a moment get my breath, and the yard went very far away, and I was not in Tanner’s Yard at all, I was at the Festival of Ropes in the year 8571a, and it was not a lizard-folk girl of seven bleeding on my coat, it was

He had not finished the sentence. The entry broke off there, in the margin of the Ledger of Arrivals, with the pen-stroke trailing off the end of the last word into a small blot. Then there was a space. Then, below it, in a hand rather steadier, as if written some while later:

Took the child home to her mother in Bell St. Mother thanked me. Went back to the office. Considered posting a notice forbidding the hanging of children by the teeth from washing lines, ropes, cords, branches, rigging, or any other thing within the city of Saltcoil. Am not certain the harbor master has authority within the city. Wrote the notice anyway, and was about to post it on my door, when the serpent woman came to the office. I had not sent for her. She had heard. She stood in the door of the office, very tall, with her tail out on the cobbles of Wharf St, and she said, Harbor Master, the children. I heard about the children. Is the little one all right. I said she was. She said, I’ll speak to them. I said that was not necessary, I had a notice. She said, they won’t read a notice, Harbor Master, but they’ll listen to me. Then she went away, down Bell St, toward Tanner’s Yard. I did not follow her. Weatherby did, and came back an hour later and told me what she had done. She had gone into Tanner’s Yard where the children were and coiled herself down on the cobbles so that her head was at their height, and gathered them all round her, the six of them and some others who had come. And she had opened her mouth and shown them her teeth. The green caps and the silver tips and the bands with the engraved serpents and the crystal. And she had shown them, Weatherby said, the place underneath where her own fang had broken, the stump. And she had said: Don’t. Not with your teeth. Not till you’re grown, and not till you have shoes for them. Teeth go first. I know. I broke mine. And then, Weatherby said, she had let them all touch the silver tips, one at a time, very gently, and then she had told them a story about a striped tent and a woman in silver who hung by her teeth, and the children had sat round her on the cobbles of Tanner’s Yard in the cold and listened until it was dark, and then gone home, and not one of them, Weatherby says, has hung from a washing line since. I did not post the notice. I put it in the drawer of my desk. I do not know why I am writing all this. It is not a matter for the Ledger of Arrivals. Coins thrown this morning. Seven days. I disapprove.

And then, in the very narrow strip at the very edge of the page, below everything else, where it could scarcely be seen, there were seven small upright strokes, made with the point of the pen, all in a row:

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The reader will have observed that the entries in the margin of the Ledger of Arrivals had been growing longer. Quillimore Drabb observed it too. He had of course read them, every one, though he would have died rather than say so. He read them each morning at half past five, when he came in and hung his thin coat on the fourth hook from the left. He lit the stove, if the harbor master had not already lit it, which in Tyrus he generally had not, for the harbor master was out on the wharf at Helios up. Then he opened the green canvas ledger to the page for the previous day and read the margin by the light of the lamp before the harbor master came back. He did not do it out of curiosity. He did it, he told himself, to keep the ledger in order. But he did it every morning, and he read every word, and on the morning of the eighth day of Tyrus he read the entry for the seventh twice. Then he sat a long while on his low stool with the ledger open on his knees and his large wet eyes very wet indeed.

He did not sigh. He had nothing to sigh at.

Then came the week of Warming.

The week of Warming is named, as everyone in Saltcoil knows, for the heating up that follows the cold of the week of Darkness. In some months it is mild and in some it is hot. In the month of Tyrus, in the year 8612a, it was very hot indeed. The frost that had lain white on the cobbles of Wharf Street every morning of Darkness and Illumination was gone by the first day of Warming. By the third day there was no dew. By the fifth the tar between the planks of the wharves had begun to soften and stick to the soles of boots. The harbor smelled of hot pitch and hot rope and hot fish. The gulls sat on the bollards with their beaks open, panting.

8612a3.2.1. Conjursday. Warming.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Eighth day. Warm already at Helios up. Crowd thinner on account of the heat, perhaps three hundred. Fettle has put a canvas awning over his table. Thrupp the nut seller has added cold barley water to his trade at two copper the cup, without license, on Wharf St, where I cannot touch him. Coins thrown. I disapprove.

8612a3.2.2. Evoday. Warming.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Ninth day. Hotter. The tar on the new manila halyard at the truck has gone soft in the sun. When she came down this morning I saw from the foot of the wharf that her lips were black with it at the corners. Asked Larkspur whether the halyard could be changed for an untarred line. He said an untarred line would rot in a week in salt air. Ordered him to have the riggers wipe the tar from the upper six feet of it each evening, as business of the ship. He said aye, sir, and again did not ask why. Also: Merran of the Gull’s Daughter has wagered on the serpent, two silver, at ten to one, the whole month without a fall. When I asked her what her husband would say if she lost two silver she said, he’ll say I’m a fool, Harbor Master, and he’ll be wrong. Coins thrown. I disapprove.

8612a3.2.3. Abjursday. Warming.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Tenth day. Hotter still. Riggers wiped the tar as ordered. But the rope itself, in this heat, is very rough and very dry, and when she spins upon it with her full weight hanging from it the friction must be very great. When she came down this morning her mouth was bleeding. Not much. At both corners of the lips, where the halyard runs between them. Rope burn. I have seen it on a thousand hands in this harbor, on sailors who let a line run too fast through their fingers. I have never seen it on a mouth. She wiped it with the back of her hand and laughed and waved to the crowd. The young sailor Penhallow brought her a cup of water and she drank it and it ran down her chin pink. Fettle shortened his odds to evens on a fall by end of week. The sailors of the P. Aunt and the Frostwind and half the trade ships on the inner wharves have opened their own books among themselves, below decks, out of my sight and jurisdiction, on which day she will fall. Coins thrown. I disapprove.

8612a3.2.4. Transmuday. Warming.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Eleventh day. The hottest morning yet. The rope at the truck was hot to the touch at Helios up, before the sun had properly risen, because it had not cooled in the night. Her mouth was not healed from yesterday. I saw her pause at the top before she took the halyard in her teeth. She paused some moments, longer than any morning before, with the rope in her hand, looking at it. The crowd saw it too. Somebody on the wharf, one of the sailors, laughed, and called out something about a sack of grain, and the men around him laughed with him. I turned round and looked at him. He stopped. Then she put the rope in her mouth and let go and hung. I saw her whole body flinch when her weight came on the rope, the way a man flinches when a hot iron touches him. I saw her jaw clench. I saw blood on the halyard, a dark mark on the pale manila, spreading. And she spun. She spun as she had spun every morning, faster and faster, and at the top she stopped, and spread her arms, and looked down, and her lips moved round the bloody rope. I do not know what she said. Then she came down. When she reached the deck her mouth was bleeding freely and she could not speak, and Penhallow had to hold the cup for her. The crowd did not cheer for some time. Then they did, louder than they have ever cheered, and threw so many coins that two of them struck me, standing at the foot of the wharf, and one of them knocked off my hat. I picked it up. Eleven days. I disapprove.

He had underlined the last two words. He had underlined them twice, as he had once underlined serpent woman, looking up, in the margin of a page in Lathandus. He pressed so hard with the pen that it tore the paper a little at the end of the second line.

And then, below the seven small upright strokes in the narrow strip at the very edge of the page for the seventh day, there were now four more:

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8612a3.2.5. Divinday. Warming.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Twelfth day. Her mouth not healed. Worse, if anything. I went this morning before Helios up, at three, to the shop of Gearwhistle the gnome in Ropewalk Lane, where she sleeps, and knocked, and the gnome came down in his nightshirt with a lamp and told me it was three o’clock in the morning. I said I was aware of the hour. I said I had come on harbor business, concerning the condition of a performer who climbs upon a vessel moored in the harbor, and whose injuries might constitute a hazard to the port. The gnome looked at me a long while over the top of his goggles, which he wears even in his nightshirt, and then said, hmph, and went back inside, and came out a minute later with a small pot of something. He said, mangrove sap and beeswax and a little silver dust, for burns. I make it for the forge. Tell her to put it on the corners of her mouth before she climbs and after she comes down. I said I would not tell her anything, as she was not in my charge. He said, then why did you come. I did not answer. He gave me the pot. I took it to the P. Aunt and gave it to Larkspur and told him to give it to his ordinary seaman, the serpent, as business of the ship. He took it. He looked at me. He said, Harbor Master, you could give it to her yourself. I said that would not be proper. She climbed. She hung. She spun. She did not fall. Her mouth bled less. Coins thrown. I disapprove.

8612a3.2.6. Enchanday. Warming.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Thirteenth day. Fettle’s odds now three to one against a fall by end of month, which means he thinks she will not fall, which means he will lose a great deal of money. He has asked me privately whether a bookmaker may be relieved of his obligations in the case of an act of the gods. I told him that is a matter for the city and not the harbor. I believe I enjoyed telling him. This morning, for the first time, I could hear her. When she stopped at the top of the spin and spread her arms and looked down, there was a quiet on the wharf so deep that I could hear the halyard creak a hundred and forty feet above. And beneath it, very faint, a sound like a hum. Like the hum of rigging in a wind. Or a voice, very low, through closed teeth. Penhallow, beside me, said, she’s telling it. I asked him who she was telling. He said, the fish, sir. Everybody knows. She tells the fish what she sees. I said that was nonsense. He said, yes, sir. Coins thrown. I disapprove.

And here we come to the last entry of the week of Warming. The reader may judge for himself how the harbor master’s ledger had changed in the fourteen days since the serpent woman first climbed. The entry for the first day had been five lines. The entry for the fourteenth filled the whole of the right-hand margin of the page, from top to bottom. It crowded the entries for the trade ships and the fishing smacks into the left-hand columns, and spilled at last over onto the foot of the facing page, where there was a little blank space beneath the record of a ketch from the islands to the south.

8612a3.2.7. Illusday. Warming. Last day of the week.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Fourteenth day. Two weeks.

I record the following because it occurred, and because I am the harbor master, and it is my duty to record what occurs in this harbor, and for no other reason.

It was the hottest morning of the week, and of the month, and I think of the year. At Helios up the boards of the central wharf were already warm to the hand. The tar was running in the seams. The crowd was larger than on any morning since the first week. I think the whole of Saltcoil had heard by now about the bloody rope, and had come to see whether she would climb with her mouth as it was. I estimate five hundred people on the central wharf and along the inner wharves, and as many again in the rigging of the ships and at the windows of the warehouses and on the roofs of the city. I stood at the foot of the central wharf with my arms folded. I record who was there.

Fettle was at his table on Wharf St, under his awning, sweating, with his tin box and his slate, on which the odds now read: FALL BY END OF MONTH, FIVE TO ONE AGAINST. Beside him was the Pellingworth woman, who now wagers on the serpent every day and wins every day and is become, I am told, quite unbearable at the fish market. Thrupp the nut seller was beside them with his brazier and his barley water. Merran of the Gull’s Daughter was there with her uncle Brek and her husband, who had come, he told me, to see what his wife had wagered two silver on, and who stood with his mouth open throughout. Weatherby the dockhand was there, running up and down the wharf, crying. Captain Vask of the Frostwind stood beside me, shivering, though it was so hot. Larkspur was at the rail of the P. Aunt with his splinter. Penhallow was in the rigging on the main yard. Nettie Brindle was there, the girl from the Blue Gull tavern, with her apron over her head against the sun. The children from Tanner’s Yard were sitting in a row on the edge of the wharf with their legs dangling, the little lizard-folk girl among them with a bandage on her chin. Gearwhistle the gnome was behind the stack of crates by Hollin’s warehouse, with his goggles down, pretending not to be there, as he has every morning. My clerk, Drabb, was there, who has come out at Helios up every morning since the fourth day, and stands a little behind me, and says nothing, and goes back to the office before I do so that I will not see that he came. I see. And at the very end of the farthest wharf, on the last piling, too far off to see clearly, there was the old shellback grandmother, as there is every morning, looking this way.

She came down Ropewalk Lane at the usual time. The crowd parted for her, and called her name. She went up the gangplank. She nodded to Larkspur. She went to the foot of the mast and put her hands on it and looked up. And I saw, from the foot of the wharf, that the corners of her mouth were still dark and raw, and shining with the gnome’s salve, and that she was afraid.

I have kept this harbor forty-seven years. I know fear. I have seen it in the faces of sailors going aloft in a gale and in the faces of fishermen putting out past the breakers in the week of Darkness and in the faces of mothers on the wharf waiting for boats that are late. I saw it in her face this morning, at the foot of the mast, looking up. She was afraid. Not of falling, I think. Of the rope. Of the pain of it. Of putting that hot rough bloody rope between her raw lips one more time and hanging her whole weight from it and spinning.

She stood there some moments. The crowd went quiet. Nobody laughed. Nobody called out about sacks of grain.

And then she put her hands to the mast and coiled, and went up, round and round and up, the long green spiral of her, in the heat, with the tar running in the seams of the mast and the sweat of five hundred people steaming off the wharf. She did not wave at the main top. She went straight on. Past the topsail yard. Past the topgallant yard. To the truck. And she took the halyard in her hand, and looked at it, and I saw her shoulders rise and fall, once, as a person’s do when they take a deep breath. And she put it in her mouth. And she let go.

I saw her flinch. Every soul on the wharf saw her flinch. I saw the halyard go dark at her lips. And I saw her spin.

She spun faster than she has ever spun. Faster than any morning. A green blur at the top of the mast in the white-hot morning light. Faster and faster, until I could not see her arms or her tail or her face, only the blur. And at the very top, at the very fastest, she stopped. She spread her arms. And she held the stillness longer than she has ever held it, so long that I thought she would never move again. And her lips moved round the bloody rope. And the whole of the harbor of Saltcoil, five hundred on the wharf and five hundred more in the rigging and at the windows and on the roofs, did not breathe.

Nor did I.

Then she came down. And the crowd shouted. I have no words for how the crowd shouted. And they threw coins. Penhallow needed five caps.

And I

I record the following because it occurred.

I unfolded my arms. I did it without deciding to. They came apart of their own accord, as a knot comes apart when the rope it is tied in has been under strain too long. And I found that I was clapping. Standing at the foot of the central wharf of Saltcoil in my storm coat and my hat and my chain of office, in front of five hundred people and my clerk and Gearwhistle the gnome and Fettle the bookmaker and the children from Tanner’s Yard. Clapping. Not loudly. Not long. My hands came together perhaps four times, perhaps five, before I noticed what they were doing and stopped them and folded my arms again.

Drabb saw it. Captain Vask saw it. The little lizard-folk girl with the bandage on her chin saw it, and pulled at the sleeve of the girl next to her and pointed.

I do not account for it. It was the heat.

I disapprove. I wish that to be understood. I disapprove of all of it. I disapprove of a serpent woman climbing a mast. I disapprove of anybody hanging from a halyard by their teeth at the truck of the tallest ship in my harbor, a hundred and forty feet above an oak deck. I disapprove of the crowds and the gaming and the hot nuts and the barley water, and of the children hanging from washing lines, and of the blood on the rope, and of the coins knocking off my hat. I disapprove of the rule having been got round by a mate with a sense of humor and a pen. It is not safe. It is not proper. It is not orderly. There is no line for it in any ledger in this office, nor in any of the four volumes of the Statutes of the Harbor of Saltcoil, and a thing that has no line is a thing that may go wrong at any moment, as a mast with no stays may go over in any gust. Somebody will fall. Somebody always falls. And then it will be written in the black ledger, in my own hand, and it will be on my head.

I disapprove.

She has not fallen.

Fourteen days.

And there, at the very foot of the facing page, in the little blank space beneath the record of the ketch from the islands to the south, there were seven more small upright strokes, made with the point of the pen, all in a row. With the seven on the page before, and the four on the page before that, and the rest, they made fourteen.

| | | | | | |

And then, after a space, in writing so small that Quillimore Drabb, reading it at half past five the next morning by the light of the lamp, had to bring his large wet eyes within an inch of the paper to make it out:

Thirty-five to go.

Drabb read it three times. Then he closed the ledger very gently and put it back on the desk exactly as he had found it, square to the edge. He hung his thin coat on the fourth hook from the left and lit the stove, which did not smoke, for the wind was out of the west. Then he went to the bruise-blue door and opened it and looked out at the harbor in the gray before dawn.

At the foot of the central wharf a short broad figure stood alone, with a black hat on its head and its arms folded across its chest, looking up at the top of the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt.

“Good morning, sir,” said Quillimore Drabb softly, though the harbor master was much too far off to hear.

And for the first time in nineteen years, without the least notion why, the clerk of the harbor office of Saltcoil smiled.

• Segment 17: Rooftop Calibrations

Being a Scientific Inquiry Conducted by Tibbet Gearwhistle, Silversmith and Toothwright, of Ropewalk Lane, upon the Roof of His Own Shop, into Whether a Serpent Woman May Hang by Her Teeth from the Main Truck of a Merchant Ship, with the Conclusion That She May Not, and Some Remarks upon the Unreliability of Instruments

Of the Purpose of This Inquiry

I wish it to be understood at the outset that I did not undertake this inquiry out of any interest in the serpent woman.

My interest in the serpent woman is purely commercial, and has been satisfied. She contracted with me on the fourth day of the week of Darkness in Lathandus for a pair of fang caps at a price of eight silver. She paid one copper on signing and owed the remainder within one month of completion. She paid it in full by the third day of the week of Illumination in Tyrus, out of the coins thrown at her, which the young sailor Penhallow carries to my shop in his cap each morning after she comes down. That was twenty-six days before it was due. On the third day she paid one copper more than the balance owed. When I pointed out the error she said it was not an error, it was interest. I said that interest is not payable on a debt settled before term. She said, then it’s a present. I said I do not accept presents from customers. She said, then put it toward the next pair. I asked what next pair. She said, the troupe’s. I asked what troupe. She laughed and went out. I have entered the copper in my books under Sundry Receipts, Unexplained. Our commercial relations are concluded, and my interest in her is at an end.

My interest is in the question.

It is a scientific question, and a simple one, and it was put to me, without her intending it, by the serpent woman herself on the evening of the seventh day of the week of Illumination. She had come in from Tanner’s Yard, where she had been telling stories to some children. As she settled in the warm corner behind my forge, where she has continued to sleep since the fitting at no charge, under an arrangement intended solely to protect my floor, she said to me: “You know, Tibbet, I’ve no idea how I do it.”

I asked what she meant.

“The hanging,” she said. “From the halyard. By my teeth. I did it in the other life, in the tent, for years. But that was different. That was a different body, a much smaller one, and the bit was made of leather and steel, and the rope had a swivel in it, and the king pole didn’t move. Here, I weigh much more, and the halyard’s just a rope, and the mast sways like a tree in a gale. And the teeth are your caps on a serpent’s fangs on a serpent’s jaw, and serpents’ jaws aren’t made for holding. They’re made for swallowing. They come apart.” She yawned, widely, showing the green caps and the silver tips by the light of the forge. “I just do it. I don’t know how.”

She went to sleep. I did not.

I lay awake upstairs, considering the matter. I found, considering it, that I did not know how she did it either. That I could not tolerate. I am a gnome of science. I do not permit things to occur in my vicinity without understanding the mechanism by which they occur. A thing whose mechanism is not understood is a thing that may fail at any moment, without warning, like a gear with a hidden flaw. It occurred to me, lying there in the dark, that there might be a hidden flaw in this one.

I resolved, therefore, to determine by exact measurement and calculation whether what the serpent woman was doing was possible. I confess that I had some expectation of the answer. I had predicted, on the seventh day of the week of Dimming in Lathandus, that she would fall. She had fallen. Since then, by means of my caps, she had not. But the caps were only one part of a system that included her jaw, her neck, her weight, the halyard, the mast, the wind, and the motion of the ship upon the water. I had had no part in any of these, and had examined none of them. I suspected that on proper examination at least one of them would prove inadequate. If it did, I should be able to say to her exactly where the danger lay, and how great it was, and she could govern herself accordingly.

That was my purpose. It was a reasonable purpose, and a scientific one. I set it down here so that nobody may suppose I had any other.

Of My Instruments, and the Roof

My shop in Ropewalk Lane is a building of three stories, if one counts the loft. It has a flat roof of tarred boards, reached by a ladder through a trapdoor in the ceiling of the loft, from which I dry my pumice in the summer. The roof stands forty-one feet above the cobbles of the lane. It commands, over the roofs of the houses below, a clear view of the inner harbor and the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt, at a distance which I determined by triangulation to be eleven hundred and four feet.

On the morning of Conjursday, the first day of the week of Warming, I carried up the ladder the following instruments:

A sighting instrument of my own manufacture, consisting of a brass tube with crosshairs of spider silk at one end and a lens at the other. It is mounted upon a graduated circle so that angles may be read to the sixtieth part of a degree. With it I can measure the height of any object at a known distance, or the distance of any object of known height.

A plumb line of waxed silk, ten feet long, with a lead bob of one pound, hung from a tripod, to give me a true vertical against which to measure the sway of the mast.

A pendulum of the same construction, for timing.

My clock, the one given me by the World Bank, which glows blue when wound because of the luster of its brass key.

A wind gauge, also of my own manufacture: four small cups of tin upon a spindle, which turn in the wind. The turns are counted against the clock to give the speed of the wind in feet per second.

A spring balance of good steel, graduated to three hundred pounds.

A notebook, and two pencils, and a knife to sharpen them.

I set up the instruments on the roof in the dark, an hour before Helios up. I sighted the brass tube on the main truck of the Prosperous Aunt and read the angle, and from it and the distance computed the height of the truck above the waterline. It came to one hundred and forty-one feet and three inches, which agrees well enough with the common estimate of a hundred and forty. Then I sighted on the truck again and watched it against the crosshairs for a full quarter of an hour by my clock, timing its sway. The truck of a mast is never still. Even in a ship moored in a calm harbor it moves, as the ship rolls on the swell and the mast bends in the wind. I found that the truck of the Prosperous Aunt moved back and forth across my crosshairs through an arc of three feet and two inches at its widest. It completed each swing in eleven seconds. The wind at the time was from the southwest at nine feet per second by my gauge, and the swell in the harbor small.

Then the serpent woman came out of my shop below me and went down Ropewalk Lane toward the harbor. I watched her go, and then put my eye back to the brass tube and waited.

Of the Sway of the Mast

I will not describe the climb, which has been described elsewhere, at length, by persons of a more literary turn than myself. I will describe only what I measured.

When she reached the truck and coiled herself round the mast beneath it, the sway of the truck increased. Her weight, added at the top of the mast, made the mast into a longer and heavier pendulum. The arc of the swing grew to four feet and seven inches, and the period to thirteen seconds. This was as I expected, and I wrote it down.

When she took the halyard in her teeth and uncoiled herself from the mast and hung, the sway changed again. Her weight was now hanging free from the end of the halyard, below the block. The mast and the hanging serpent made a compound pendulum, a pendulum hung from a pendulum, which is the most complicated motion in the whole of mechanics. I had prepared for it. I had worked out the night before, in my notebook, the equations by which such a motion is described. From them I had computed in advance what the swing of the truck should be when she hung from it. I had computed what the swing of the serpent should be, hanging from the truck, and the greatest tension the halyard should feel at the bottom of each swing, when the two motions combined.

I timed the sway with my clock and measured it with my crosshairs. The truck swung through an arc of four feet and one inch, with a period of twelve seconds and a half. The serpent, hanging beneath it, swung through an arc of six feet and eleven inches.

My equations had predicted an arc for the truck of five feet and four inches, with a period of fourteen seconds. They had predicted a swing for the serpent of nine feet and two inches.

The mast swayed less than it ought to have done, by a foot and three inches. The serpent swung less than she ought to have done, by two feet and three inches. I measured it three times over the course of her hanging, and it was the same each time.

I record this observation exactly. I attribute the discrepancy to an error in the measurement of the distance from my roof to the mast. If that distance were less than I had taken it to be, by about a fifth, all my readings of the arcs would be too large in the same proportion. I would, in effect, have been seeing a larger sway than there was. I resolved to measure the distance again the next day.

Then she began to spin. I gave up the measurement and simply watched, through the brass tube, at the full magnification of the lens, as she turned and turned at the end of the halyard in the early light. At the very top of the spin she stopped and spread her arms, and the whole harbor went quiet. I could hear it go quiet, eleven hundred and four feet away, over the roofs. I found that I had taken my eye from the brass tube and was looking at her with my own eyes, which is of no scientific value whatsoever. I put my eye back to the tube. She was coming down.

I measured the distance again on Evoday by a different method. I paced it, from the door of my shop to the foot of the gangplank of the Prosperous Aunt, counting my steps. Then I measured the length of my step against a rod, and computed. It came to eleven hundred and two feet. My triangulation had been correct to within two feet. The error was not in the distance.

I record this, and pass on.

Of the Rope

On the afternoon of Evoday I went down to the Prosperous Aunt and asked to speak to the mate, Larkspur. I wished to examine the signal halyard. On the fifth day of the week of Illumination it had been replaced, at the order of the harbor master, with new line of the best manila. The old halyard, I understood, had been coiled and stowed in the ship’s bosun’s locker, as old line generally is, against the day it might be needed for something less important. The serpent woman had hung from it for the first five days of Tyrus.

Larkspur looked at me a long while out of his small dry eyes, with a splinter in his teeth.

“The old halyard,” he said.

“The old halyard.”

“You want it.”

“For a scientific purpose,” I said. “I wish to determine its breaking strength.”

“Its breaking strength,” said Larkspur, and took the splinter out of his mouth and looked at it. “Why?”

“Because she hung from it,” I said, “five times. With her full weight. Spinning. And I wish to know how near it came to breaking.”

Larkspur put the splinter back in his mouth. He went below. He came back a few minutes later with the old halyard coiled over his arm, sixty feet of three-eighths-inch hemp, gray and fuzzy, frayed at one end where it had run through the block at the truck. He held it out to me.

“No charge,” he said. “Business of the ship.”

I took it home and up to the roof. There I rigged a beam between two chimney stacks and cut from the old halyard a length of six feet, taken from the frayed end, the part that had run through the block. That was where she bit it, and where it had worn most. I made one end of the length fast to the beam with a round turn and two half hitches, and tied the other to an iron hook. From the hook I hung a basket. Into the basket, one at a time, I put bricks. Each brick I had weighed beforehand on my spring balance, and each came to about four pounds and three ounces. I recorded the weight of each, and the total in the basket after each was added.

The rope broke at six hundred and eleven pounds and four ounces. It parted at the very place I had expected, eleven inches from the frayed end, where she bit it.

I record the figure exactly.

Of the Serpent Woman’s Weight

To complete my calculation of the tension in the halyard, I required the weight of the serpent woman. I had estimated it, from her length and girth, at somewhere between three hundred and four hundred pounds. An estimate is not a measurement. I therefore asked her, on the evening of Abjursday, whether she would consent to be weighed.

She asked why. I told her plainly. She looked at me a long while with her gold eyes and then laughed, her loud rattling laugh, and said she would.

There is no scale in Ropewalk Lane large enough to weigh a serpent woman of twenty-six feet. There is one on the fish market at the foot of Bell Street. It is a great iron steelyard hung from a beam over the landing stage, for weighing the catch, with a platform at one end large enough to take a whole barrel of herring. At ten o’clock on the night of Abjursday, when the market was closed and empty and the lamps were out, I took her down there. I unhooked the platform from its chain and spread it with a clean sailcloth. She coiled herself up on it, round and round, as tight as she could, so that none of her hung over the edge. I moved the counterweight along the beam until it balanced.

She weighed three hundred and ninety-six pounds and nine ounces.

While I was reading the beam, she said, from the middle of her coils, “Is that heavy?”

I said it was a great deal heavier than a gnome.

She said, “My mother weighed a hundred and twenty pounds. In the other life. She used to say she could hang by her teeth because she was light. She said a heavy woman couldn’t do it. The jaw wouldn’t take the weight.” She was quiet a moment. “I’m more than three times what she was.”

I did not answer. I wrote down the figure and took her home.

Of the Calculation

On the night of Abjursday, after the weighing, I sat up on the roof by the light of a lamp and made my calculation.

I will set it out simply, for the reader not of the trade.

When a weight hangs still from a rope, the tension in the rope is equal to the weight. If the serpent woman hung perfectly still from the halyard, the tension would be three hundred and ninety-six pounds and nine ounces. The old halyard broke at six hundred and eleven pounds and four ounces, so it would have held her with something to spare.

But she does not hang still. She swings, with the sway of the mast. She spins. And when she first lets go of the mast and her weight comes onto the rope, it comes onto it suddenly, with a jolt. A weight that swings, or spins, or comes suddenly onto a rope, puts more tension on the rope than its own weight. In the case of a swing, the excess depends upon the length of the swing and the speed at the bottom of it. In the case of a spin, it depends upon the speed of turning. In the case of a jolt, it depends upon the suddenness of it and the stretch of the rope. Each of these can be calculated, and I calculated them all, from the figures I had taken. From the swing of the mast and the serpent, as I had measured it on Conjursday. From the speed of her spin, which I had timed through the brass tube on Evoday at its fastest: one complete turn in a little under a second. From the suddenness of the jolt, which I estimated from the rate at which she uncoiled. And from the stretch of three-eighths-inch hemp, which is known.

Adding the tension from the swing and the spin and the jolt together, at the worst moment, when all three combined, I found that the greatest tension in the halyard should have been seven hundred and thirty-four pounds.

The old halyard broke at six hundred and eleven.

She hung from it five times, on each of the first five days of the month of Tyrus. On each occasion, by my calculation, it should have parted at the moment of greatest tension, at the bottom of the swing in the full spin, and dropped her a hundred and forty feet onto the deck. It did not part. It held, five times, and was coiled up afterwards and stowed in the bosun’s locker, and given to me by Larkspur, and broke on my roof at six hundred and eleven pounds under a basket of bricks.

I sat on the roof a long time looking at the figures.

Then I did the calculation again from the beginning, to see whether I had made an error. I had not. I did it a third time, with every quantity taken at the most favorable value it could reasonably have. I took the shortest swing, the slowest spin, the gentlest jolt, the stretchiest rope. Even so the greatest tension came to six hundred and fifty-eight pounds. That was still forty-seven pounds more than the rope would bear.

It is not possible. I record this conclusion. What the serpent woman did on the first five days of Tyrus is not possible.

I attribute the discrepancy to my spring balance. The bricks were weighed upon it, and if the spring had weakened with age, as springs do, every brick would have read lighter than it was. The rope would then have broken at a greater weight than I recorded, perhaps a good deal greater. I resolved to have the balance tested against the standard weights kept at the harbor office.

I may add that I had the balance tested at the harbor office on the following afternoon. Quillimore Drabb, the clerk, took the standard weights down from their shelf without a word and laid them one by one on the pan. The balance was true to within two ounces in three hundred pounds.

I record this, and pass on.

Of the Jaw

On Transmuday, the fourth day of Warming and the hottest yet, I turned my attention to the jaw.

My first calculation had concerned only the rope. But even if the rope had held, the question remained whether the jaw could hold. There I had a particular concern, which I will explain.

The jaw of a serpent is not like the jaw of a gnome, or an orc, or a dwarf, or any other creature of the ordinary sort. It is not a single bone, hinged at each side to the skull. It is two bones, a left and a right, joined at the chin not by a solid joint but by a ligament, a stretchy band of gristle. And each is hinged to the skull not directly but by way of a third, loose bone, which swings. The reason for this arrangement is that the serpent swallows its food whole. The jaw must be able to open wide enough to take in a fish, or an egg, or a rat, larger than the serpent’s own head, and the two halves must be able to spread apart and walk over the food, one side and then the other, drawing it in. It is admirable for swallowing. For holding, it is the worst possible arrangement. A jaw made to spread apart under a load will spread apart under a load. Hang a serpent from a rope by its teeth, and the rope will pull the two halves of the jaw open and apart, as a key turned in a lock draws back the bolt. The serpent will drop.

I had observed this in the common reef viper, which I have dissected. I had confirmed it by reference to the anatomical texts in the library of the Guild of Apothecaries in Bell Street, at a charge of one copper for the afternoon. There was no doubt about it. By every principle of anatomy, the serpent woman ought not to be able to hang by her teeth at all, still less spin.

That evening, after the climb, when she had come home with her mouth bleeding at the corners, I asked her to bite something.

I had made it that afternoon. It was a small device of steel, consisting of two plates joined by a heavy spring, with a pointer and a dial graduated in pounds. A bite on the plates compresses the spring, and the pointer shows the force of the bite. I had graduated it to six hundred pounds, which is about four times the bite of a full-grown orc, and very much more than any serpent could be expected to manage.

She looked at it. She looked at me. Then she took it in her mouth, between the green caps, gently, at the corners where it did not touch the raw places, and bit.

The pointer went round to six hundred pounds and past it, and struck the stop at the end of the dial. And then, with a small sharp sound like a pot breaking in the next house, the spring buckled, and the plates came together, and the pointer bent double against the stop and broke off.

She took it out of her mouth and held it out to me. “Sorry,” she said.

I took it. I looked at it. I put it on the bench.

I record that the bite of the serpent woman, by the measure of my device, exceeds six hundred pounds by some unknown amount, sufficient to destroy the device. I record that this is impossible for a jaw of the serpent type, which cannot close with any great force because the two halves are not rigidly joined. And I attribute the result to a defect in the spring of the device. I had tempered it myself that afternoon, in haste, and it had very likely been overtempered and made brittle.

I asked her, as she settled behind the forge, how she held the halyard. With a jaw like hers, I said, the rope ought to pull her mouth open.

She thought about it. “It does,” she said. “It tries to. Every time. I can feel it. Pulling the two sides of my jaw apart, like hands pulling a curtain.”

“Then how do you hold?”

She lay a while in the warm dark behind the forge, thinking. Then she said: “I hold on.”

I waited for her to say more. She did not. In a little while she was asleep.

I sat at my bench a long time after that, with the broken bite-meter in front of me, and did not go up to bed.

Of the Harbor Master’s Visit

I record briefly a matter that has been recorded elsewhere, I understand, by another hand, in another ledger, with somewhat less accuracy.

At three o’clock in the morning of Divinday, the fifth day of the week of Warming, I was sitting at my bench. I had not gone up to bed since the affair of the bite-meter. I had just finished making a small pot of salve for burns. I do not as a rule make salve for anyone but myself; I make it for the forge, where I burn my hands perhaps twice a week. But the serpent woman’s mouth was bleeding again at the corners, worse than the night before. It occurred to me that she would bleed upon the floor of my back room, which is stone and does not take stains well. It seemed sensible to prevent it. I made the salve with mangrove sap and beeswax and a little silver dust, and was intending to leave it on the corner of the forge, where she would find it in the morning, without saying anything.

At three o’clock precisely, by my clock, there was a knock at my shop door.

I opened it with a lamp in my hand. On the step stood the harbor master, Old Dunmoor Saltbeard, in his hat and his storm coat and his chain of office, at three o’clock in the morning, with his arms folded. He looked like a man who had been standing outside the door for some time before he knocked.

I informed him that it was three o’clock in the morning. He said that he was aware of the hour. He said that he had come on harbor business, concerning the condition of a performer who climbed upon a vessel moored in the harbor, and whose injuries might constitute a hazard to the port.

I looked at him over the top of my goggles. He looked back at me with his squinted eye. Neither of us said anything for some time. Then I said, “Hmph,” and went back inside, took the pot of salve from the corner of the forge, and brought it out to him.

I told him what was in it and what it was for. He asked me why I did not give it to her myself, since she slept in my shop. I said that she was asleep. That was true. It was also true that it would have required me to explain to her why I had made it, which I could not, since I had made it to protect my floor, and she would not have believed me. It was simpler to give it to the harbor master. I gave it to him. He went away into the dark with it, holding it in both hands before him as if it were a thing of value.

I went back inside and sat at my bench, and found that I was annoyed, and could not think why.

Of Further Failures, and Their Causes

On Enchanday, the sixth day of Warming, I measured everything again.

I measured the sway of the mast, empty and loaded. I measured the swing of the serpent woman beneath the truck, and the speed of her spin. I measured the wind. I sighted, timed, read, recorded. I did it all three times over, with the greatest care of which I am capable, which is very great.

The figures did not agree with my calculations. They were no nearer agreeing than they had been on Conjursday. The mast swayed less than it ought, and the serpent swung less. The tension in the new manila halyard, which I had not been able to test, was by my calculation near seven hundred pounds at its greatest. The breaking strength of new three-eighths manila is by the tables about twelve hundred, so the new halyard would hold. But the old one should not have held, and it had. And the jaw should not have held at all, and it had, every day, for thirteen days.

I list here, for completeness, the causes to which I attribute these failures.

First, the instruments. The brass tube, the plumb line, the pendulum, the wind gauge, the spring balance, and the bite-meter are all of my own manufacture. Though I have tested and calibrated each of them, any instrument may develop faults in use that are not detected in calibration. The bite-meter, in particular, I have already noted was very likely overtempered.

Second, the wind. The wind in the harbor of Saltcoil in the week of Warming is variable. It comes off the sea in the morning and off the land in the evening, and it eddies among the warehouses and the masts. The reading at my roof, forty-one feet above Ropewalk Lane, may not be the wind at the truck of the Prosperous Aunt, a hundred and forty-one feet above the water and eleven hundred feet away. A difference in wind would affect the sway of the mast, and so all my figures.

Third, the gulls. On Enchanday morning, at the moment of greatest interest, when the serpent woman had just let go of the mast and her weight had come onto the halyard, a gull landed on my plumb line. It was a herring gull of the common sort, of perhaps two pounds. It sat on the tripod and looked at me, and the plumb line swung through an arc of eleven inches. My reading of the vertical, and so of the sway of the mast, was spoiled for the whole of that hanging. I chased the gull away. It returned. I chased it away again. It returned with another gull. I record that gulls are a hazard to precise measurement, and that they appear to know it.

And fourth, the city in the clouds.

I record this cause last because it is the one in which I have the least confidence, and also, I am obliged to admit, the most. The city in the clouds passed over Saltcoil on the seventh day of the week of Dimming in Lathandus, at a quarter past two in the afternoon. I have recorded that passage elsewhere. It has since drifted away westward, but I am told by sailors from the islands to the west that it has not drifted far. It is still lying over the sea some forty or fifty miles off, at the edge of the horizon, where it can be seen on clear evenings as a small gold cloud. The city in the clouds is held up, as I have also recorded elsewhere, by the floating spells of mages, cast every day for a year upon great stone bowls. Such spells are, by their nature, a disturbance of the ordinary operation of weight. A body upon which a floating spell has been cast does not weigh what it ought. It occurs to me that a disturbance of weight on so great a scale, involving a hundred towers and six hundred bowls and the labor of generations of mages, may not be confined to the bowls themselves. It may leak. It may spread outward through the air, and lie over the surrounding sea and the islands beneath it like a mist. It may very slightly alter the weight of everything within fifty miles. If it does, then a serpent woman hanging from a halyard in the harbor of Saltcoil would weigh a little less than she ought, and the tension in the halyard would be a little less, and the jaw would hold a little more easily, and all my calculations would be thrown out by some small amount that I cannot measure.

I put this forward as a hypothesis only. I am aware that it requires me to suppose that floating magic, which I do not hold with, is responsible for the success of an act that I do not understand. I am aware that this is not satisfactory. I am aware that the sailors from the west report no such disturbance in their own weighings of cargo, and that the fish market steelyard showed no such disturbance when I weighed the serpent woman upon it. I am aware of all of this. I put it forward anyway, because it is the only hypothesis I have.

Of the Fourteenth Day

On Illusday, the seventh and last day of the week of Warming, I did not go up to my roof.

I went instead, at half past four in the morning, to the stack of crates beside Hollin’s warehouse on the inner wharf. I had stood there, I may record, on each of the first seven mornings of Tyrus before I began this inquiry, for reasons of no scientific interest. I stood behind the crates with my goggles down and my arms folded. I did not take my brass tube, nor my plumb line, nor my clock, nor my notebook. I took nothing. I was there merely to observe.

It was the hottest morning of the month. Her mouth had not healed; the salve had helped, but not enough. I saw her go up the gangplank and nod to Larkspur, go to the foot of the mast, put her hands on it, and look up. And I saw her afraid.

I had not seen that before. I had watched her thirteen mornings, through a brass tube and with my own eyes, and I had seen a great many things. I had not seen her afraid. She stood at the foot of the mast a long time, looking up at the halyard hanging from the truck, and I saw her shoulders rise and fall. I knew, standing behind my crates, exactly what she was thinking. I had done the calculation. I knew the tension in that rope at the bottom of the swing in the full spin, to the pound. I knew what it would do to the raw corners of her mouth. I knew the force with which it would try to pull the two halves of her jaw apart, like hands pulling a curtain. I knew that no jaw of the serpent type could hold against it.

She went up.

I will not describe it. It has been described elsewhere. I will say only that she spun faster than on any morning before, faster than my calculation allowed for, faster than I had believed possible. And at the top she stopped and spread her arms and held the stillness longer than ever. And I stood behind my crates and could not breathe, and could not take my eyes from her, and found that my hands, which had been folded, were gripping the edge of the top crate so hard that I drove a splinter into my palm.

And she held. She came down. The harbor shouted.

I record, though it has no bearing upon the inquiry, that at the foot of the central wharf I observed the harbor master, Old Dunmoor Saltbeard, clapping his hands together. He did it four times or five, and then folded his arms. I record also that I did not clap. I was occupied with the splinter.

Of My Conclusion

I went home and up to my roof and sat down among my instruments, the brass tube on its graduated circle and the plumb line and the wind gauge and the broken bite-meter, in the full heat of the day. I opened my notebook and read through every figure in it from the first page to the last.

Then I wrote my conclusion.

It is not possible for a serpent woman of three hundred and ninety-six pounds and nine ounces to hang by her teeth from a three-eighths hemp halyard of six hundred and eleven pounds’ breaking strength at the truck of a mast swaying through four feet, while spinning at one turn a second, without the halyard parting. It is not possible for a jaw of the serpent type, whose two halves are joined by ligament and not by bone, to hold any such weight at all against the force of the rope drawing it open. It is not possible, therefore, for the serpent woman to do what she has done.

She has done it fourteen times.

I have checked my figures. They are correct. I have checked my instruments. They are true, or very nearly. I have considered the wind and the gulls and the city in the clouds, and none of them, separately or together, accounts for a discrepancy of this size. There is no cause I have been able to identify. There is no mechanism I have been able to discover. There is a thing that cannot happen, and it happens every morning at Helios up, in plain sight of five hundred people. I have measured it to the sixty-fourth of an inch, and I do not understand it.

I find this very uncomfortable. I wish to record that. I have been a gnome of science for sixty-one years, and I have never before met a thing that refused to be measured. I have met things that were difficult to measure. I have met things I measured wrongly, and corrected. But I have never met a thing that I measured exactly and correctly, every quantity of it, and found that the measurements simply did not add up to what I saw with my own eyes.

It is like a column of figures that does not sum. You check every figure, and every figure is right, and you add them, and the total is wrong. You add them again, and it is wrong again. And you sit there with the pencil in your hand and the total staring up at you, and something cold and small turns over in your stomach. You begin to suspect that the fault is not in the figures, nor in the adding. It is in arithmetic itself.

I do not believe that the fault is in arithmetic. I wish that understood. I believe there is a cause I have not found. I shall find it. I shall continue the inquiry for the remaining thirty-five days of the month, with better instruments and greater care, and I shall find it, and it will be a natural cause. And that will be the whole of it.

Of a Drawing

I record here, for completeness only, one further matter.

While I was writing the conclusion above, I had occasion to make a small drawing in the margin of my notebook. It was to illustrate the distribution of the load upon the fang caps when the halyard is held between them: where the rope bears upon the enamel, where the enamel bears upon the fang, and where the silver bands bear upon the gum. It is a simple matter of statics, and a drawing makes it clearer.

I drew the left cap, in profile, with the halyard passing beneath it. Then, for symmetry, the right. And since the load passes from the caps through the silver bands, and the bands are engraved, I drew the engraving on the bands, so as to show where the metal was thinnest. Then, for accuracy, the scales on the enamel, darker toward the point, thirty-one rows on each. And the silver tips, needle-sharp. And the crystal in its bezel on the inner face of the left band, small and round and dull.

And then I found that I had drawn, between the two bands, very small, the two engraved serpents, each biting its own tail. They faced each other across the gap where the halyard ran, head to head.

The drawing is not necessary to the calculation. The serpents bear no part of the load. I do not know why I drew them. I record that it is a very good drawing, the best I have made in many years. It is three inches and five-eighths across, in pencil, in the right-hand margin of page forty-one of my notebook. It is the first drawing I have made of the caps since I made them. I had not supposed that I would make any.

I tore the page out of the notebook. I did it carefully, along the binding, so as not to leave a ragged edge. I folded it once, and took it downstairs to my shop, and slid it into the narrow gap between the top of my workbench and the wall behind it, where I keep things I do not wish to lose and do not wish to look at. There are a great many things in that gap. I have not looked in it in some years.

Then I went back up to my roof and put my eye to the brass tube and sighted it on the main truck of the Prosperous Aunt, eleven hundred and four feet away, empty now in the heat of the afternoon, swaying through three feet and two inches every eleven seconds. And I sat there until Helios went down, watching it, and doing sums in my head that did not come out.

Thirty-five to go. I do not intend to miss one.

• Segment 18: The Color of the Hills

Of the Tellings

Before we speak of the hills, we must speak of the tellings. They came every morning, and they are the reason we have anything to speak of at all.

Every morning since the first day of the month of Tyrus, at Helios up, she has spoken to us. We lie coiled around our black rock in the deep below Saltcoil, where the light gives up. Far above us she lies coiled around the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt, a hundred and forty feet above the deck. She takes the halyard between our old shed fangs and lets go and hangs. She spins. At the top of the spin she stops, and spreads her arms, and looks down. And with her mouth closed upon the rope, she tells us what she sees.

Her voice comes down to us through the old sheaths. We do not fully understand how. We said to her, at the edge of the deep, that a fang knows the fang it came from, and that is true. But to know a thing is not the same as to understand it, and we have lived eight lives knowing a great many things we do not understand. The voice goes from her lips into the rope and from the rope into the green enamel that was once ours. From the enamel it goes into the pearls at the roots of our living fangs, and from the pearls into the long dark length of us. It does not come as sound. It comes as a hum, low and steady, like the hum of rigging in a wind, or the note a bell makes long after it has been struck. And within the hum there are words, as there are words within the bubbles of a swimmer, or seeds within a pod. We hear them. Every one.

We have kept them all. We keep them as the grandmother keeps her beads, counted and strung, one for each morning. We will set them down here, the first fourteen, as a catalogue, briefly, so that the reader may know what manner of thing came down to us in the dark.

On the first morning she told us that the water was a green bowl with white edges. The boats were seeds floating in soup. The sailors had their mouths open, like little fish. And she told us that Helios came up out of the sea like a wet dog and shook itself, and that we should have seen it.

On the second morning she told us that the roofs of the city were red and gray and brown and climbed the hill like the scales on a serpent’s back. Smoke went up from the chimneys in thin threads that all bent the same way in the wind, like weed in a current.

On the third morning she told us that there were children on the wharf sitting in a row with their legs hanging over the edge. One of them was eating something on a stick, and she could not see what.

On the fourth morning she told us of the gulls. They were white from above, not gray, as they look from below. When they turned in the air the light went through the edges of their wings and made them glow.

On the fifth morning she told us that she could see the reef. She could see the long white line of it, where the water breaks over the coral beyond the breakwater. Beyond the line the water went dark, a deep blue, almost black, and she said: that is where you are. I can see where you are. We had not known until that moment that the place where we lie could be seen from anywhere at all. We lay still a long time after.

On the sixth morning she told us that the great banded world was setting in the west as Helios rose in the east, and that from the top of the mast she could see both at once. One was gold and one was pale cream with rust bands, and they looked at each other across the whole sky like two old friends who had nothing left to say.

On the seventh morning she told us there was a stack of crates by a warehouse, and a small cross gnome behind it, pretending not to be there.

On the eighth morning, the first of the week of Warming, she told us that the frost was gone from the boards of the wharf. She could see the dark wet places where it had melted, in the shape of the footprints of the people who had stood there in the night waiting for her to climb.

On the ninth morning she told us that the tar on the halyard was soft and tasted of pine trees. Then she laughed, and said we had never tasted a pine tree, and she would try to think of something else, and could not.

On the tenth morning her voice came down to us thick. There was something in it, a catch, a wetness, that we did not at first understand. Then we did. We felt it in the sheaths. The rope between them was hot, hotter than it had any right to be, and rough, and it was burning. We felt the heat come down through the old enamel into our living fangs. It was faint, a ghost of heat, the way one feels the sun through deep water. But it was there. And beneath the heat there was something else, salt and iron, which we knew. It was blood. She was bleeding at the corners of her mouth where the rope ran, and still she spoke, and what she said was this: the gulls are panting. They sit on the bollards with their beaks open, like dogs on a hot day. I did not know gulls could pant.

On the eleventh morning it was worse. The heat in the sheaths was so great that we uncoiled from our rock without meaning to and lay half off it with every scale on end, as we had lain on the morning of the thud. And she said only: I see five hundred faces. They are all looking up. Nobody is laughing.

On the twelfth morning there was something cool and sweet in the sheaths that had not been there before, beneath the heat. We did not know what it was. We learned later, from the chain, that a small cross gnome had made it in the night and given it to an old dwarf with folded arms, who had given it to an orc with a splinter in his teeth, who had given it to her. Her voice was clearer. She told us of a little lizard-folk girl with a bandage on her chin, sitting on the edge of the wharf, waving.

On the thirteenth morning she told us that the harbor master had come down from his step to the foot of the wharf, and was standing there with his arms folded and his head tipped back, and was not breathing. She said: I can see that he is not breathing, from up here. I can see everything from up here.

And on the fourteenth morning, the hottest of all, the heat in the sheaths was so great that we thought for a moment she would let go. She held. She spun, faster than she had ever spun. We felt it as a long rising hum in the sheaths, like a wind building to a gale. And at the top, in the stillness, with her mouth burning and bleeding round the rope, she said only one thing. She said it very quietly, so quietly that we almost did not hear it beneath the hum:

Fourteen.

That was the catalogue. Fourteen mornings, fourteen tellings, strung like beads. We had lived eight lives on that rock, and every one of the tellings was a thing we had never known before. And then came the week of Blooming, and the hills.

Of Color in the Deep

We must now say something of color. We find this hard, for reasons the reader will soon understand. But it must be said, or nothing that follows will make sense.

The dry ones believe that the world is full of color, and that color is a property of things. A rose is red, a leaf is green, the sky is blue, and the redness and the greenness and the blueness are in the rose and the leaf and the sky, as the sweetness is in honey. They believe this so completely that it never occurs to them to doubt it. And in their own world, in the air, under the full light of Helios, perhaps it is so. We do not know. We have never lived there.

In the sea it is not so.

In the sea, color is not a property of things. It is a property of light, and light, in the sea, is a thing that is slowly taken away. The deeper one goes, the more of it the water takes, and it does not take all of it at once. It takes it a little at a time, one color after another, in an order that never changes, as a thief takes the valuables from a house: the most precious first.

It takes red first.

In the shallows, near the wharves, where the children dive for shells, red is still red. The coral on the reef top is red, and the crabs, and the small darting fish with their scarlet fins. A cut on a swimmer’s hand bleeds red. But go down a few fathoms, ten or fifteen, and the red begins to go. It goes dull and brown and dark. Go down a little farther, twenty fathoms, and it is gone altogether. The red coral is black. The scarlet fish are gray. And a cut on a swimmer’s hand, if a swimmer were to come so deep and cut himself, would bleed green. Not red. Green. A thin dark green cloud spreading in the water from the wound, like ink.

We have seen this. We have seen it many times, in our lives of killing, when we killed the dry ones near our rock. Their blood came out of them green. We had thought, for our first several lives, that green was the color of blood. We did not learn otherwise until the fourth, when the diver who came looking for pearls cut his hand on the coral near the reef top. We saw it bleed red, a color we had never seen, that we had no word for. We were so astonished that we let him go.

After red, the sea takes orange. After orange, yellow. After yellow, it begins to take the greens, slowly, the warm greens first and then the cool. By forty fathoms there is nothing left but blue. By sixty, where the reef falls away by ledge and shelf and broken stair, there is only the deep velvet blue, darker and darker, the blue of evening just before night. And below that, at the bottom of the stair, where the light gives up and our black rock lies, there is no color at all. There is only dark, and the faint gray glimmer of the silver ceiling far above, like a window in a house seen from the bottom of a well.

That is where we live. That is where we have lived for eight lives.

We have seen blue. Every blue there is, a thousand blues, from the pale gray-blue near the reef top to the velvet blue of the stair to the black-blue of the deep. We have seen green, the cool greens of the middle water and the deep. We have seen gray and black and the dim silver of the ceiling. We have seen, when we rose to the reef top on summer nights to breathe, faint ghosts of the warm colors, dulled by the dark and by the water in our eyes. Brownish pinks, grayish golds, a red so dark that it was nearly black. We have seen nothing else.

Consider what that means. The dry ones live in a world of red and orange and yellow, of roses and fires and the gold of Helios. They see these colors every day without thinking of them, as they breathe the air without thinking of it. And there are creatures beneath them, a few fathoms down, who have never once in their lives seen any of it. Who do not know what red is, or orange, or yellow. Who have been told the words for these things by divers and gull-women and fishermen talking over the sides of boats, and who keep the words as a miser keeps coins he cannot spend. They take them out in the dark and turn them over and wonder what they would buy.

We are such a creature. We have been poor in color for eight lives. We had not, until the week of Blooming, known how poor.

Of the Scent

It came on the first morning of Blooming, the fifteenth of Tyrus, before Helios up. It came, as it always comes, down through the water, sinking.

We have spoken before of the scent of the hills. It is the only thing of the land that has ever come down to us whole. In the week of Blooming, every month, the hills above Saltcoil flower. Some months the flowering is small, a few patches here and there on the warm slopes. In some months it is great, the whole of the hills from the edge of the city to the high ridges bursting into bloom at once. In those months the scent of it rolls down off the hills with the evening wind, across the roofs and the wharves, out over the harbor. It settles on the water and sinks. It goes down through the green and the gray and the blue, fainter and fainter, until it comes at last to us on our black rock. We taste it in the water with our tongue. It is faint by then, very faint, a mere ghost, like a word whispered at the far end of a long hall. But it is there. It is sweet and strange and warm, and it is like nothing else that has ever come to us in the deep.

The month of Tyrus, in the year 8612a, was a month of great flowering.

We knew it the moment the scent came down. It was stronger than in any month we could remember. It was so strong that even at our rock it was not a ghost but a presence, a sweetness that filled the water and lay on our tongue and would not go away. We uncoiled a little from the rock to taste it more fully. We lay there in the dark before dawn, tasting it, and something in us that had been warm since the edge of the deep grew warmer.

And then, at Helios up, the hum came down through the sheaths, and her voice in it. And she said:

“The hills have changed color.”

We waited.

“Yesterday they were green,” she said. “Brown and green, with the frost gone off them. Today they’re not. Today they’re… oh. Oh, I wish you could see. I wish you could see it.”

We wished it too. We have wished it for eight lives.

“There are flowers,” she said. “All over the hills. Everywhere. Yellow and purple and white and red. All of them at once, all over the hills, as far as I can see. It’s like…” Her voice faltered in the hum. “It’s like someone spilled every color there is over the hills. Like a painter dropped his whole box of paints.”

Then she was quiet a moment, hanging in the stillness. And she said, more softly:

“I’m sorry. You don’t know what any of that means, do you.”

And she came down.

Of Yellow

We lay all that day on our rock in the dark, tasting the scent of the hills in the water, and thinking.

We thought of yellow and purple and white and red. Four words. We knew all four. We had heard them from the fishermen and the diver and the gull-woman, from the shrimp and the octopus and the chain. We knew that they were colors, the colors of things on the land. We knew that the dry ones saw them every day. We did not know what they were. They were coins we could not spend.

White, perhaps, we half knew. The breaking water on the reef is white, and the bellies of certain fish, and the bones of the dead when they have lain long on the sand. We have seen these things. But yellow, purple, red. Those were only words.

And she had said: I’m sorry. You don’t know what any of that means.

She was right. We did not. And we found, lying there, that it was a terrible thing to be told. Not because it was unkind; it was not meant unkindly. It was terrible because it was true, and because we had known it was true for eight lives, and had never before had anyone say it to us aloud, in pity.

So on the second morning, the sixteenth of Tyrus, when the hum came down and her voice in it, we did a thing we had not done since the edge of the deep. We answered.

We do not know how it is done. We had never tried it. We had told her that we would hear her, and we had heard her every morning for fifteen mornings. We had never spoken back. We did not know whether we could. But that morning, as she hung at the top of the spin in the stillness with her mouth closed on the rope, we gathered our great deep voice up out of the long dark length of us. We sent it, not out into the water as we usually do, in every direction at once, but inward, into the pearls at the roots of our fangs. From the pearls it went into the old shed sheaths far above, and from the sheaths into her.

And we said: “What is yellow?”

We felt her jerk on the rope. We felt it in the sheaths, a sudden small shock, like a fish striking a line. And then she was very still. She hung there a long moment, longer than her usual stillness. Then her voice came down to us again, and it was different. It was hushed, and full of wonder, as a child’s voice is when it has heard something in the night.

“Was that you?”

“It was us,” we said.

“I heard you. I heard you in my teeth. It was like… it was like a bell. Inside my head.” She was quiet a moment. “Say it again.”

“What is yellow?” we said.

And she laughed. Up there at the top of the mast, a hundred and forty feet above the deck, with her mouth closed on the halyard, she laughed. It came down to us through the sheaths as a long rising hum, like a wind gusting, and we felt her whole body shake on the rope.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, that’s a hard one. Let me think. Let me think about it. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

And she came down.

On the third morning, the seventeenth of Tyrus, she told us.

“Yellow,” she said, “is like the light on the water at noon. Do you know that? At noon, when Helios is highest. Not the light under the water, the light on top of it, the light that comes off it when you look down at it from above. All those bright splashes. That’s nearly yellow. That’s what yellow is like.”

We thought about this. We knew the light on the water at noon from below: the silver ceiling bright with it, almost too bright to look at, a great white shimmer far above. We did not know it from above. But we knew it was bright, and that it came from Helios, and that it was warm.

“Is yellow bright?” we asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes! Yellow’s bright. It’s the brightest color there is, nearly. And warm. Yellow’s warm. Like the light. Like Helios. The flowers on the hills that are yellow look like small pieces of Helios that fell down and stuck in the grass.”

Small pieces of Helios that fell down and stuck in the grass.

We lay on our rock in the dark after she came down and turned that over and over, as the grandmother turns her beads. Small pieces of the sun. Bright and warm and fallen. We tried to picture it. We could not, quite. We have never seen the sun except as a brightness on the silver ceiling, and we have never seen grass at all. But we could picture something. A brightness, a warmth, a scattering of small bright warm things on something dark, the way the light scatters gold on the water when Helios shakes itself. It was not yellow. We knew it was not yellow. But it was nearer to yellow than anything we had ever had, and we held it in us all that day as one holds a warm stone in one’s hand on a cold night.

Of Red

On the fourth morning, the eighteenth of Tyrus, we asked her about red.

We did it with some dread. We had begun to understand, through yellow, how the thing might be done. One takes a color the other knows, or nearly knows, and builds the unknown color out of it, as a mason builds a wall out of stones. Yellow had been built out of the light on the water, which we knew from below if not from above. But red. What did we know that was red? Nothing. Nothing at all. Red is the first color the sea takes. It is gone by twenty fathoms. We had never seen it except once, in the fourth life, on the cut hand of a diver near the reef top. Even then we had seen it for only a moment before he swam away, and we had been so astonished that we could not afterwards remember what it looked like. Only that it was not green, and that it should have been.

“What is red?” we asked.

She was quiet a long time, hanging in the stillness.

“Red is the color of blood,” she said at last. “In the air. Blood is red.”

“Blood is green,” we said.

We felt her start on the rope.

“Blood is green,” we said again. “In the deep. We have seen it. When the dry ones bleed near our rock, their blood is green. Dark green, like ink. We thought for three lives that green was the color of blood.”

She did not say anything for a long while. And when she spoke again, her voice was very strange.

“Green,” she said. “Your blood is green. All blood, down there.”

“All blood,” we said. “Down here.”

“Oh,” she said. And then, after a long time, again: “Oh.”

She came down without saying anything more. We lay on our rock in the dark and thought that we had frightened her, or saddened her, or both. We wished we had not asked.

But on the fifth morning, the nineteenth of Tyrus, she came back to it.

“I’ve been thinking about red,” she said. “All day yesterday. And all night. I lay behind the forge in the gnome’s shop and thought about it and thought about it. He told me to stop thinking so loud, because he couldn’t sleep.” The hum shook; she was laughing. “I couldn’t think how to tell you. Every red thing I know is a thing you’ve never seen. Blood. Fire. The inside of a mouth. Roses. The stripes on the tent in the other life, the red stripes. Cherries. I couldn’t think of a single red thing you’d know.”

We waited.

“But then I thought,” she said, “about the rock.”

“The rock,” we said.

“The rock you lie on. Down there. At the bottom. The fish told me. Or the grandmother did. I don’t remember. Someone told me you lie on a black rock that was once fire. That it’s warm, still. That it remembers being fire.” She was quiet a moment. “Is that true?”

“It is true,” we said.

“Then that’s red,” she said. “Red is the color fire is, when it’s burning. Red is the color your rock was, before it was black. When it came up out of the floor of the sea, hot and melting and bright, before the water cooled it. It was red then. It glowed red, like a coal in a forge. That’s what red is. It’s the color of the warmth in your rock. The warmth that’s left. If you could see the warmth, it would be red.”

We lay on our black rock in the dark, coiled round it as we had for eight lives, and felt the faint warmth of it against our scales. The warmth we had felt every day of every life, and never once thought about. The warmth of a rock that remembers being fire.

Red.

We did not see it. We wish to be honest. We did not see red. We have never seen red, and we never will. But we felt the warmth of the rock against our scales, and we knew, as we had never known before, that the warmth had a color. The color was red. Somewhere up there in the air, under the full light of Helios, the dry ones could see it. And the serpent woman had given it to us by the only door we had. She had taken a thing we had touched every day for eight lives and never seen, and told us its color.

We have lain on that rock a great many times since, and each time, now, we think: red. Each time, the warmth is a little warmer.

Of Purple

And on the sixth morning, the twentieth of Tyrus, Enchanday, she gave us purple.

The scent of the hills was stronger that morning than it had been all week. It was the height of the flowering, the fishermen said, the greatest flowering in twenty years. The scent rolled down off the hills in the night and lay over the harbor so thick, the chain told us, that the sailors on the night watch on the trade ships could smell nothing else. Even the fish market smelled of it. At our rock in the deep it was so strong that we lay with our mouth a little open, as the gulls had lain in the week of Warming, tasting it, unable to stop.

And she said, at the top of the spin, in the stillness:

“I want to try to tell you about purple. But I want to do it differently. I want to ask you something first.”

“Ask,” we said.

“Can you smell the hills? Down there? Can you smell the flowers?”

We were silent a moment, astonished.

“Yes,” we said. “We can. We have always been able to, in the season of Blooming. It is the only thing of the land that has ever come down to us whole. It is stronger today than we have ever known it.”

“I thought so,” she said. And her voice, in the hum, was full of something we did not at first understand. Later we did, and it was joy. “I thought so. The grandmother said you could. I asked her. I went down to the end of the farthest wharf last night, where she sits counting the ships. I asked her whether the Reef Viper could smell the flowers, down in the deep. She looked at me a long while with her old eyes and clicked her beak and said, smell? Smell. And then she walked away.” She laughed. “But I knew she meant yes.”

We did not say anything. There was nothing to say about the grandmother that we wished to say just then.

“So listen,” said the serpent woman. “Listen. What you’re smelling now, today, right now, that sweet strong smell coming down to you through the water, that’s mostly one flower. There are lots of flowers on the hills, the yellow ones and the white ones and the red ones. But the most of them, the one that covers the whole of the high slopes, all the way up to the ridges, is a small low flower that grows in great spreading carpets, so thick you can’t see the ground. And it smells like that. Like what you’re smelling. And it’s purple.”

We lay very still.

“The whole of the hills is purple,” she said. “From halfway up to the very top. It goes on and on, as far as I can see from up here. It rolls over the ridges like a wave. And when the wind blows across it, it moves, all of it at once, like water. Like the sea. Like a purple sea, up on the land, under the sky.”

The scent lay on our tongue, sweet and strong and warm.

“That’s purple,” she said. “That’s what purple is. It’s the color of that smell. It’s the color of what you’re tasting, right now. If you could see the smell, it would be purple. The whole of the hills is the color of that smell.”

And we saw it.

We wish to be honest, as we have tried to be honest throughout. We did not see it with our eyes. Our eyes see what they have always seen in the dark: nothing, and the faint gray glimmer of the silver ceiling far above. But we saw it. Somewhere behind our eyes, somewhere in the long dark length of us, in the place where we keep the memories of our eight lives, we saw it. It was a great rolling sea on the land, under the sky, moving in the wind like water. And it was the color of the sweetness on our tongue. The sweetness we had tasted every month in the season of Blooming for eight lives, and loved, and never once known had a color, was purple. The sweetness was purple. The smell was purple. The hills were purple. And we had been tasting purple our whole life long without knowing it, and now we knew.

We do not know how long we lay there. We know that she came down at some point. We know that the hum in the sheaths stopped and the day went on and the light on the silver ceiling far above grew brighter and then dimmer, and the evening came. We know that we did not move from our rock all that day. We lay there with our mouth a little open, tasting purple.

Of Tears

And we wept.

We must say something about the weeping, for it is the strangest part of this account and the part we least understand.

The dry ones weep from their eyes. We have seen them do it, the fishermen over the sides of their boats and the sailors at the rails of the ships and the mothers on the wharf waiting for boats that are late. Salt water comes from their eyes and runs down their faces, and they wipe it away. They are ashamed of it, or relieved by it, or both. It is a thing they do when there is too much in them to hold, and some of it must come out.

We do not weep so. Or we did not think we did.

But we are a viper of the sea, and all vipers of the sea weep, always, every hour of every day. Not from our eyes; from our mouths. Beneath the tongue, at the root of the jaw, there is a small gland. Through it, ceaselessly, the salt we take in with the sea water goes out again, a little at a time, so that it does not build up in our blood and kill us. The fishermen do not know this. Even the octopus does not know it. But it is so. We live in salt water, and we drink it with every mouthful, and we must weep it out again or die. We have wept salt into salt water every moment of every one of our eight lives, without thinking of it, as the dry ones breathe without thinking of it. It is how we live.

That evening, lying on our black rock in the dark with the taste of purple on our tongue, we wept differently.

We felt it come. It came up from somewhere deep in the long dark length of us, from the place where we had seen the purple sea rolling over the hills. It came up through our throat and into our mouth, and the gland beneath our tongue, which had wept salt steadily and quietly for eight lives, wept more. It wept faster, and harder, and the salt that came out of us was not the steady, quiet, necessary salt of living. It was something else. It went out of us into the water in a slow warm cloud. The water around our rock tasted of it, sharp and strong. The small fish who nest in the folds of our body came out of their hiding places and hung in the dark, tasting it, puzzled, and went back in again.

We do not know how much we wept. We could not tell you. And this is the thing we most wish to set down, for we have been told that there is a gnome in Ropewalk Lane who measures everything. The chain tells us he has been sitting on his roof for a week with brass instruments and plumb lines, measuring the sway of the mast and the weight of the serpent woman and the strength of the rope. He is trying to prove that what she does cannot be done, and he is very unhappy because his figures will not come out.

He could not measure this.

He could not measure the salt we wept that evening into the salt water around our rock. Not with all his brass instruments and all his plumb lines and all his careful figures to the sixty-fourth of an inch. For it went out of us into the sea, and the sea is salt already, and salt into salt leaves no mark. There is no way to tell, in the great water, which salt was wept and which was always there. One cannot separate them. One cannot weigh them. One cannot draw a line in a ledger and say: this much was grief, and this much was joy, and this much was only the sea. It is all one water. It is all salt.

And it was not grief only. We wish to be clear about that. If it had been grief only, it would have been simpler. There was grief in it, a great deal. Grief for eight lives in the dark without color. Grief for every morning we had lain on our rock tasting the scent of the hills and not known it was purple. Grief for every month of Blooming we had let go by, every carpet of purple that had rolled over the ridges and moved in the wind like the sea while we lay below, blind, not knowing. Grief that we will never see it, ever, with our own eyes. Grief that we never can.

But there was joy in it too. And the joy was stranger than the grief, and greater, and we did not know what to make of it.

For the joy was not ours. Not in the way that joy is usually one’s own. It was not the joy of a creature that has been given a thing it wanted. We had not been given purple. We cannot have purple. It was the joy of a creature who has learned that the thing it wanted, and can never have, exists. Somebody else has it. Somebody else is up there at the top of the mast every morning, seeing it, the whole of the hills rolling purple under the sky. And she is glad of it. She is so glad of it that she lay awake all night behind a gnome’s forge thinking how to tell us. She went to the end of the farthest wharf and asked an old grandmother whether we could smell. She found the only door into us that would open and opened it, and put the purple through it, so that we could have it too, a little, in the only way we could.

We cannot see the hills. She can. And her seeing them, and loving them, and telling us of them, is a joy to us that is greater than seeing them ourselves would be. We do not understand that. We set it down because it is true.

The dry ones, we are told, have a word for it, for the joy one feels in another’s joy, in a thing one cannot have oneself. We do not know what the word is. We have no need of it. We know the thing.

On the seventh morning of Blooming, the twenty-first of Tyrus, Illusday, the last day of the week, the scent of the hills was fainter. The flowering was passing, as it always passes. The purple sea on the high slopes, she told us from the top of the mast, was beginning to go brown at the edges, and the wind across it did not move it as it had. In a few days it would be gone, and the hills would be green and brown again until the next month.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry it doesn’t last.”

“Do not be sorry,” we said.

“But it’s going. I can see it going. The purple. It’ll be gone by Passion.”

“It will come back,” we said. “In the next month. And the next. It has come back every month for longer than your city has had a name. And now,” we said, and our great deep voice was not quite steady in the sheaths, “now we will know what it is when it comes.”

She was quiet a long time at the top of the spin.

“Twenty-one,” she said at last, softly.

“Twenty-one,” we said.

“Twenty-eight to go.”

“Twenty-eight to go.”

And she came down. We lay on our black rock in the dark, which was once fire and was red, coiled round it as we have for eight lives, with the faint fading taste of purple on our tongue. We wept salt into salt water, and nobody could measure it, and we were glad.

• Segment 19: The Fly in the Nose

There are a great many stories about the serpent woman who hung by her teeth from the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt in the month of Tyrus. You may have heard some of them. Perhaps you have heard about the first morning, when the whole harbor laughed and then fell silent and then threw coins. Perhaps you have heard about the rope that burned her mouth in the week of Warming, or the purple hills in the week of Blooming. And perhaps you have heard about what happened at the very end, in the week of Darkness, in the storm. Everybody has heard about that. It is the one they tell at weddings and at funerals and on long winter nights by the fire, and the children beg for it again and again.

But there is one story about her that is hardly ever told. The people of Saltcoil who were there, who saw it with their own eyes, say quietly that it was the greatest of all her dances. If you ask them why it is so seldom told, they look a little embarrassed, and say: well, because of the fly.

This is that story. It was first told by an old grandmother on the last piling at the end of the farthest wharf in Saltcoil, on the evening of the fourth day of the week of Buzzing, to a row of children sitting on the edge of the boards with their legs hanging over the water. I will tell it as she told it, as nearly as I can. You must imagine the clicks of her beak between the words, for I cannot write them all down, there were so many.

It was evening. Helios was going down into the sea in the west, red and gold, and the great banded world VaporSphere was coming up in the east, pale as cream. The fishing boats had all come home and been counted, one, two, three, all thirty, and one more, which was not there. The pilings were creaking and the tired ropes sighing, and the old horn-shell on its iron straps was humming faintly in the wind. And along the edge of the wharf, in a row, sat eleven children.

They had come every evening since the week of Illumination. It had begun with the children from Tanner’s Yard: the ones the serpent woman had gathered round her on the cobbles and shown her teeth and told about the striped tent. They had followed her down to the harbor the next morning to watch her climb, and they had stayed. And when she came down, and went away to the gnome’s shop to sleep, they had wandered along the wharves looking for something else to do. They had found the grandmother on her piling at the end of the farthest wharf, counting ships. So they sat down beside her and asked her for a story. She told them one, and they came back the next evening, and the next. Now there were eleven of them, and more some nights. They sat in a row with their legs dangling. Among them was the little lizard-folk girl with the bandage on her chin, who was called Mirri, and who always sat nearest the grandmother’s piling, so close that her shoulder touched the moss on the old shell.

“Tell us about today,” said Mirri. “Tell us about the fly.”

The other children all began to giggle.

“The fly,” said the grandmother, and clicked her beak. “The fly. You want to hear about the fly.”

“Yes!”

“You saw it,” said the grandmother. “You were all there. You all saw it this morning with your own eyes.”

“We want to hear you tell it,” said Mirri.

The grandmother looked at them a long while with her milky old eyes. Then she settled back on her worn piling, folded her flipper-hands on top of her crooked driftwood staff, and began.

“Then you shall have it,” she said. “But not the way you saw it. You saw it from the wharf, looking up. Anybody can tell it from the wharf. I shall tell it the other way, the way nobody saw it. I shall tell it from the fly.”

There was once a fly.

He was born, as most flies in Saltcoil are born, on the heap of old fish heads by the drain at the corner of the fish market at the foot of Bell Street. It is not a beautiful place to be born. It smells very strongly of old fish. But to a fly it is the most beautiful place in the world, the way a palace is the most beautiful place in the world to a prince. The flies of the fish market regarded it as their kingdom, and themselves as its lords. Of all the lords of the fish market, there was none so great, in his own opinion, as this fly.

He was a bluebottle. You know the kind, children: large and fat and shining, with a body like a drop of blue-black oil and wings like two slivers of glass. He had hatched on the second day of the week of Buzzing, and by the fourth day he was full grown, which for a fly is quite old. In those two days he had grown fat and proud and very loud. His name was Zebbelin. Or rather, that was what he called himself; the other flies called him nothing at all, because they did not like him. Zebbelin of the Fish Heads. Zebbelin the Magnificent. Zebbelin, Lord of the Drain.

“Do flies have names?” asked a small boy at the end of the row.

“Flies have whatever names they like,” said the grandmother. “That is the great thing about being a fly. Nobody can tell you otherwise, because nobody listens.” Click.

Now you must understand about the week of Buzzing. It is named, as everybody knows, for the sound of the insects each month. In some months the insects are few, and the week of Buzzing is quiet. But in the month of Tyrus, in the year 8612a, after the great heat of the week of Warming and the great flowering of the week of Blooming, the insects were very many. There were flies everywhere: flies on the fish market and flies on the wharves, flies in the taverns and flies in the warehouses. Flies sat on the bollards and the crates and the coils of rope and the noses of sleeping dockhands. They buzzed so loudly in the heat of the afternoon that you could hear them from one end of Wharf Street to the other. People swatted at them and cursed them, and the cats chased them, and the gulls ate them by the hundred. Still there were more. It was the greatest week of Buzzing in twenty years, the fishwives said, just as the week of Blooming had been the greatest flowering. And the flies knew it. They were very proud of it. They thought the whole harbor belonged to them.

Except, every morning at Helios up, it did not.

“Because of Velisse!” said Mirri.

“Because of Velisse,” said the grandmother.

For every morning at Helios up, the flies noticed, the whole harbor stopped. The dockhands stopped unloading, and the fishwives stopped gutting. The sailors climbed into their rigging, and the children ran down to the wharf. Even the gulls, who had been eating flies all night, stopped eating and sat on the bollards with their heads tipped back. And they all looked up, every one of them, at the top of the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt, where a long green serpent woman hung by her teeth from a rope and spun. While she hung there, nobody swatted a fly or cursed a fly or even noticed a fly. Nobody noticed anything at all. A fly could have walked right across a dockhand’s face and up his nose, and the dockhand would not have twitched. They were all looking at her.

The flies did not like this.

“Who is she,” said the flies of the fish market to one another, buzzing angrily on the fish heads by the drain, “who is she, that the whole harbor should stop for her? She is only a serpent. She is not even a very good serpent. She climbs like a sock up a broom handle. We are flies. We are the lords of the harbor. It is the greatest week of Buzzing in twenty years. The whole harbor should be looking at us.”

And Zebbelin, the fattest and proudest and loudest of all the flies of the fish market, rose up off the fish heads and buzzed louder than all the rest.

“I will make her fall,” said Zebbelin.

All the other flies went quiet.

“I will fly up,” said Zebbelin, “to the very top of that mast, a hundred and forty feet, higher than any fly of the fish market has ever flown. And I will make her fall. And then the whole harbor will see that a fly is greater than a serpent. And they will look at us, and not at her, forever.”

“How will you make her fall?” asked a small gray fly at the edge of the fish heads. “She is very big, and you are very small.”

“That,” said Zebbelin, “is exactly why I will succeed. She is braced for big things. She is braced for the wind, and the sway of the mast, and the pull of the rope, and the heat. She is not braced for a fly.” He buzzed his glass wings proudly. “Nobody is ever braced for a fly.”

And that, children, is the first true thing in this story. Remember it.

So on the fourth morning of the week of Buzzing, which was this morning, as you know, Zebbelin rose up off the fish heads by the drain before Helios up. He flew down Bell Street and along Wharf Street, buzzing, to the foot of the central wharf, where the crowd was gathering in the gray.

The crowd was very large that morning, larger than it had been since the week of Warming. You were all there. Mister Fettle was at his table on Wharf Street with his slate and his tin box. That morning the slate read: TWENTY-FIVE DAYS. FALL BY END OF MONTH, SEVEN TO ONE AGAINST. Mister Fettle was very sad about it, because he had taken a great many wagers on her falling, and she had not. The Widow Pellingworth was beside him, who had taken to wagering on her not falling, and won every day, and was very cheerful about it. Mister Thrupp had his brazier and his barley water. Merran of the Gull’s Daughter was there with her uncle Brek, and Captain Vask of the Frostwind, shivering. The tall heron-folk boy, Tadge, was running up and down the wharf crying she’s going up! And the old harbor master stood at the foot of the central wharf with his arms folded, where he stands every morning now, though he used to stand on his step.

And you were there, all of you, sitting in a row on the edge of the wharf with your legs hanging over.

Zebbelin flew over all of you. He flew over Mister Fettle’s table, and paused to sit a moment on the rim of Mister Thrupp’s barley water. He flew over the harbor master’s hat, and considered landing on it, and thought better of it, because the harbor master looked like the sort of person who would swat a fly with great accuracy. He flew down the wharf toward the Prosperous Aunt. And on the way, he passed a stack of crates by Hollin’s warehouse. Behind it stood a small cross gnome with brass goggles down over his eyes, pretending not to be there.

Now the gnome had a brass tube with him that morning. It was a sort of spyglass with threads across one end, which he uses, I am told, to measure things. He had it pointed at the top of the mast. Zebbelin, who was very proud and very curious, flew straight down the end of it to see what it was.

The gnome said something very loud and very rude, which I will not repeat to you, and swatted. He missed. Zebbelin flew on, buzzing with laughter. The gnome wrote in his little book that his measurements for the fourth morning of Buzzing were spoiled by a fly. And that, he says, is the whole of it.

The children laughed.

“Did he really say a rude word?” asked the small boy at the end of the row.

“He said several,” said the grandmother. “Gnomes are very good at rude words. It comes of working with small parts that keep falling on the floor.” Click.

And then the serpent woman came down Ropewalk Lane.

Zebbelin watched her come. He sat on the rail of the Prosperous Aunt, very fat and very blue and very proud, and watched her flow down the lane and along the wharf. The crowd parted for her and called her name: Velisse! Velisse! She went up the gangplank and nodded to Mister Larkspur, who was at the rail with a splinter in his teeth, as he always is. She went to the foot of the mainmast and put her hands on it and looked up. And Zebbelin looked at her, very closely, with all his thousands of little eyes. For a fly, you know, has thousands of eyes, and sees everything at once in little pieces, like a picture made of broken glass.

He saw that she was very long and very green. He saw that her teeth were green too, with silver at the tips, and that there were little silver serpents on the bands at the roots of them, looking at each other. He saw that the corners of her mouth were pink and new and shining where the rope burns of the week of Warming had healed. He saw that she was smiling. And he saw, which nobody else on the wharf could have seen, that just above her mouth, on the very front of her long narrow face, there were two small dark holes.

Her nostrils.

Serpents have very small nostrils, children. You may not have noticed. They are only two little slits at the very end of the snout, and most of the time they are nearly closed, so that you would not know they were there at all. But they were there. And Zebbelin, looking at them with his thousands of eyes, thought to himself: there. There it is. That is how I shall do it.

The serpent woman began to climb.

She coiled herself round the mast and went up, round and round, the long green spiral of her. The crowd laughed, as they always do at the coiling. Somebody shouted, there goes the old sock! and everybody roared. She laughed too, up there on the mast, and waved at the main top. And then she went on up, and the crowd grew quiet.

And Zebbelin flew after her.

Now, I want you to think about this, children. I want you to think about how far it is to the top of that mast. A hundred and forty feet. That is a long way for a gnome or a dwarf or a serpent woman. For a fly, who is no bigger than your littlest fingernail, it is a terribly, impossibly long way. Imagine if you had to climb a hill so high that it went up into the clouds, and over the clouds, and on above them into the sky. That is how far it was for Zebbelin. And he had never flown so high in his life. No fly of the fish market ever had. Flies do not fly high. They fly low, near the ground, near the fish heads, near the noses of sleeping dockhands. Up high, the wind is strong, and there are no fish heads, and the gulls are waiting.

But Zebbelin was very proud. And pride, children, will make you do a great many things you ought not to be able to do.

He flew up past the main yard. The wind caught him and threw him sideways, and he flew back. He flew up past the main top, where the serpent woman was coiling over the lip of the platform, and past the topmast. A gull saw him and snapped at him, and he dodged, and the gull’s beak closed on nothing. He flew up past the topsail yard and the topgallant yard. His glass wings were aching and his fat blue body was heavy, and the harbor below him was so far away that the wharves were like strips of brown paper and the people like grains of sand. And still he flew. He flew up and up until, at last, gasping, he came to the very top of the mainmast, where the serpent woman had just taken the halyard in her teeth and let go, and was hanging.

She hung there, a hundred and forty feet above the deck, by her teeth, with her long body hanging straight down beneath her and her arms spread wide. She began to spin.

Zebbelin landed on her crest.

He landed on the ridge of scales on the back of her head, which was spinning so fast that he nearly fell off. He held on with all six of his legs. He sat there a moment getting his breath, while the whole world went round and round him: the harbor and the hills and the sea, round and round and round, in long bright streaks like paint running down a wall. Then he set off down her face.

He walked down over her crest and her forehead, between her gold eyes, which did not see him, because they were looking out at the harbor as it went round. He walked down the long narrow bridge of her nose, past the place where her mouth closed on the rope. He came to the end of her snout, where the two small dark nostrils were. And he stopped, and looked in, and laughed his buzzing laugh.

“Now,” said Zebbelin, “you will see who is lord of the harbor.”

And he crawled into her nose.

“Eww!” said all eleven children at once, and then fell about laughing so hard that two of them nearly fell into the harbor and the grandmother had to catch them by the backs of their shirts with her staff.

“Eww,” agreed the grandmother. “Yes. Very eww. But that is what he did.”

Now you must understand what this meant for the serpent woman. She was hanging by her teeth from a rope a hundred and forty feet above an oak deck. She was spinning, as fast as she spins, with her arms spread and her whole weight on her jaw. She had worked very hard for twenty-four days not to fall. She had held through the cold of Illumination and the heat of Warming and the bleeding of her mouth. She had held through the wind and the sway of the mast and the pull of the rope and the five hundred people watching. She was braced for all of it. She was braced for every big thing that could happen to a serpent woman at the top of a mast.

She was not braced for a fly up her nose.

Nobody ever is. Remember? That was the first true thing.

From the wharf, you saw it. You all saw it. You saw her stop spinning, suddenly, all at once, not at the top of the spin, where she always stops, but in the middle. You saw her whole long body go rigid on the rope, from her crest to the very tip of her tail, stiff as a board. You saw her face twist up. You saw her eyes squeeze shut. You saw her whole body begin to tremble, a long hard shuddering tremble that went from end to end of her, so hard that the rope shook and the block at the truck rattled and the mast swayed.

And the whole harbor gasped.

Five hundred people, all at once, drew in their breath. Mister Fettle dropped his chalk. The Widow Pellingworth grabbed his arm. Merran put her hands over her mouth. Captain Vask stopped shivering. The tall heron-folk boy stopped running and stood on one leg. The gnome behind the crates said another rude word, a very short one. And the old harbor master, at the foot of the central wharf, unfolded his arms. He took one step forward, as if he could catch her from a hundred and forty feet away.

For you thought she was falling. All of you. You thought her tooth had cracked, or her jaw had given way, or her strength had gone, and she was going to let go of the rope and fall. You thought this was the end of it, the twenty-fifth morning, with twenty-four to go.

But it was not her tooth, and it was not her jaw, and it was not her strength.

It was Zebbelin.

He was in her nose, crawling about, buzzing, tickling. And a fly in the nose, children, is the worst tickle there is in the whole of the world. Worse than a feather on the foot. Worse than fingers in the ribs. Worse than a hair in the mouth or a crumb in the bed. It goes straight up inside you to the very top of your head, and it makes your eyes water and your face twist and your whole body shake. And there is only one thing your body wants to do about it, and that is to sneeze.

And if she sneezed, she would open her mouth.

And if she opened her mouth, she would let go of the rope.

And if she let go of the rope, she would fall a hundred and forty feet onto the deck of the Prosperous Aunt, as she had fallen on the first day of the week of Darkness in Lathandus. And this time there would be no little silver spark to hold back her death, because she had already used it.

All because of one fat proud bluebottle called Zebbelin, Lord of the Drain.

The children had gone very quiet.

“She held on,” said Mirri softly. “She held on. I saw.”

“She held on,” said the grandmother.

She did not sneeze. Not then. She hung there at the top of the mast with her body rigid and trembling and her eyes squeezed shut. Her face was twisted up like an old dishrag. Tears ran out from under her eyelids and down her cheeks and dripped off her chin, a hundred and forty feet onto the deck. And she did not open her mouth. She held the sneeze in. She held it in with every bit of her, from her crest to her tail. She held it in the way you hold a door shut against a gale, with your whole weight against it, while the wind howls on the other side and the hinges creak. She held it in for one second, and two, and three, and four, and five. Up in her nose, Zebbelin buzzed and crawled and tickled and laughed.

And then she did a thing that nobody on the wharf expected. Nobody had ever seen a serpent woman do it, and nobody, I think, will ever see one do it again.

She snorted.

Not a sneeze. She did not open her mouth. She kept it shut tight, clamped hard on the rope, every tooth and every silver tip and every engraved serpent holding fast. But she drew in a great breath through her mouth, round the rope, all the way down to the bottom of her long chest. And then she blew it out, all at once, as hard as she could, through her nose.

It was the loudest snort ever heard in the harbor of Saltcoil. It went off like a cannon. They heard it on the wharf, a hundred and forty feet below. They heard it at the end of the farthest wharf, where I was sitting. They heard it, the fishermen say, out past the breakwater, where the boats were putting out for the day’s fishing. The gulls on the bollards all flew up at once, screaming.

And out of her nose, like a stone out of a sling, like a cork out of a bottle, like a cannonball out of a cannon, came Zebbelin.

He shot out into the air above the harbor, tumbling over and over, his glass wings flapping uselessly, his thousands of eyes seeing the whole world go round in pieces. He went up and out and over, a long way, much farther than he had ever meant to go. And then, very slowly, as small things do, he came down.

And the serpent woman, at the top of the mast, opened her eyes.

She was still holding the rope. She had never let go. And as the whole harbor watched, with five hundred mouths open, she began to laugh.

Not with her mouth; her mouth was shut on the rope. She laughed with her whole body, the way she does. It shook her from her crest to her tail, so that she shook on the end of the halyard like a fish on a line, and the block at the truck rattled again. She laughed so hard that the tears that had been running down her face from the tickle became tears of laughing. She laughed and laughed, hanging there by her teeth. And then, still laughing, she gave a small twist of her body and began to spin again. She spun all the way up to the top, faster and faster, until she was a green blur. And at the top she stopped, as she always does, and spread her arms, and looked down, and held the stillness.

And her lips moved. She was telling the deep what she saw, as she does every morning.

What did she tell it?

I do not know. That is between her and the deep. I will not tell you, because I do not know.

But I will tell you this. The deep laughed.

“How do you know?” said Mirri at once.

“I know,” said the grandmother. Click. And she would say nothing more about it, though Mirri asked her three times.

Then the serpent woman came down. And the whole harbor, which had been holding its breath, let it out all at once, in a great roar. They shouted and they cheered, and they laughed until they had to sit down on the boards, and they threw coins. They threw so many coins that the young sailor Jory needed six caps to gather them. Mister Fettle, who had been taking wagers on her falling for twenty-five days and losing every one, laughed so hard that he forgot to be sad and threw his whole tin box. The Widow Pellingworth had to go and fish it out of the harbor with a boathook. The old harbor master, at the foot of the central wharf, folded his arms again, very quickly. But his face, those who were near him say, was twisting about under his beard in a way nobody had ever seen it do. And when he went back up to his office, Quillimore Drabb the clerk heard him, through the bruise-blue door, making a sound. A low, rumbling, helpless sound, like a load of barrels rolling down a gangplank, which went on for some minutes and then stopped.

And Zebbelin?

The children leaned forward.

Zebbelin came down, slowly, tumbling, a long way out from the Prosperous Aunt, over the water of the harbor. He did not come down on the deck, or the wharf, or the fish market, or any of the places a fly likes to land. He came down, plop, into the barley water.

“Mister Thrupp’s barley water!” shrieked the small boy at the end of the row.

“Mister Thrupp’s barley water,” said the grandmother. “In a cup. In the hand of Mister Fettle, who had just bought it, and was raising it to his lips.”

The children screamed with laughter.

“Did he drink it?” gasped Mirri. “Did Mister Fettle drink it?”

“He did not,” said the grandmother. “He looked into the cup and saw Zebbelin there, floating, with his glass wings stuck flat to the top of the barley water and his legs waving. And he said a word that was even ruder than the gnome’s. And he threw the cup, barley water and fly and all, into the harbor. And Zebbelin, Lord of the Drain, Zebbelin the Magnificent, who had flown higher than any fly of the fish market had ever flown, and crawled into the nose of the serpent woman, and nearly made her fall, went into the green water of the harbor of Saltcoil with a very small splash. A small silver fish swam up beneath him and ate him in one bite.” Click. “And that was the end of Zebbelin.”

The children were quiet for a long moment. Then the small boy at the end of the row said: “That’s sad.”

“Is it?” said the grandmother.

“He flew really high,” said the small boy. “Higher than any fly. And then he got eaten.”

The grandmother looked at him for a long while with her milky old eyes.

“He flew very high,” she said, “to make somebody fall. That is a sad kind of flying. If he had flown that high to see the sky, it would have been a different story.” She clicked her beak. “But he did not. And so a fish ate him. And the fish, I expect, was very glad of the fly, and swam away down to the reef. And there, I expect, a bigger fish ate it. And somewhere down in the deep, I expect, a very old and very large creature heard all about it from the eels, and laughed for the second time that day.” Click. “So it is not all sad.”

The sun had gone down now. VaporSphere was high and pale in the east, laying its broad cream-colored road across the water. The lamps were coming on in the windows of the city. The children’s mothers would soon be calling them home. But they did not get up yet. They sat in their row on the edge of the wharf with their legs hanging over, looking at the grandmother.

“Grandmother,” said Mirri at last. “Why don’t people tell it? The fly. Everybody was there. Everybody saw it. Why don’t they tell it?”

“Because it is silly,” said the grandmother. “A fly up the nose. It is a silly thing. People do not like to tell silly things about people they admire. They would rather tell about the wind and the heat and the storm. A storm is a grand thing. A storm makes a good story. A fly makes people laugh, and then they feel embarrassed for laughing, and then they tell about something else.” She paused. “But it was the greatest of all her dances. And the people who were there know it. And now you know it too.”

“Why?” said Mirri. “Why was it the greatest? She didn’t do anything. She just didn’t sneeze.”

And the grandmother leaned down from her piling and looked at Mirri, very close, with her old eyes. She tapped her lightly on the bandage on her chin with the tip of one clever old claw.

“Child of the washing line,” she said, “listen to me. This is the second true thing in this story, and it is the most important, so I want you to keep it. Big trials are easy.”

All the children stared at her.

“Big trials are easy,” said the grandmother. “Not easy to win. But easy to see. You see a storm coming from a long way off. You see the clouds piling up in the east and the waves getting bigger and the gulls flying inland. You have time to get ready for it. You tie down your boat and close your shutters and put on your coat. And when it comes you are braced for it, with your whole self, all the way through. You know it is a trial. You know you must be brave. And so you are brave, because you have had time to decide to be.”

She tapped the bandage again.

“But small trials,” she said, “you do not see coming. They come all at once, out of nowhere, when you are thinking about something else. A fly up your nose. A stone in your shoe. A splinter in your finger at the very moment you need to hold on. A rude word from a friend on a day when you are already tired. You are not braced for them, because nobody is ever braced for a fly. And they are so small that you are ashamed to let them beat you. But they beat people all the time, children. They beat strong people and brave people and good people every day. More people fall because of flies than because of storms. Much, much more.”

The children were very quiet.

“The serpent woman,” said the grandmother, “was braced for the storm. She has been braced for it for twenty-four days, every morning, all of her, from her crest to her tail. But the fly she was not braced for. Nobody is. And she held anyway.” Click. “She held with her eyes squeezed shut and tears running down her face and her whole body shaking, against a tickle in her nose, a hundred and forty feet up. And she did not let it beat her. And then she laughed.” The grandmother sat back on her piling. “That is why it was the greatest. Anyone can be brave in a storm, if they have time to get ready. It takes something more to be brave against a fly.”

She was quiet a moment, looking out at the dark sea toward the east, where the reef broke white in the distance.

“And I will tell you one more thing, and then you must go home to your mothers,” she said. “There is a storm coming. Not tomorrow. Not this week. But it is coming. I can feel it in my old shell, the way I always can. When it comes, the serpent woman will be braced for it. And it may be that she will be braced for it a little better, a little more truly, all the way through, because of a fly called Zebbelin. Because the fly taught her something this morning about holding on that the wind and the heat could not.”

“What?” said Mirri.

“That you do not always get to see it coming,” said the grandmother. “And you must hold on anyway.” Click.

Then the mothers began to call from the end of the wharf. The children got up, one by one, and said goodnight to the grandmother, and ran off along the boards toward the lamps of the city. They were laughing still, and saying Zebbelin! to one another, and making buzzing noises, and snorting through their noses as loud as they could. Mirri went last. At the very end, she turned back and called:

“Grandmother! Was the fish really glad?”

“Very glad,” called the grandmother. “It was the best fly it had ever eaten. It was very fat, and very proud, and it had flown higher than any fly in history. You can taste that, in a fly.” Click.

Mirri laughed and ran off.

And the grandmother sat on her worn piling at the end of the farthest wharf in the dark, with her staff across her knees, and laughed softly to herself, for a long time. The pilings creaked. The ropes sighed. The old horn-shell hummed.

“You enjoyed that,” said the old shell.

“I enjoyed it,” said the grandmother.

“A fly up the nose,” said the old shell. “Of all the things. Of all the dances, and the tellings, and the bleeding and the burning and the purple hills, it is a fly up the nose that you choose to call the greatest.”

“It was the greatest,” said the grandmother. “And it was the silliest. Those two things can be the same, you know. Very often they are. The world is a much more ridiculous place than people like to think, old shell, and a much more wonderful one. And when you find a thing that is both at once, you must hold on to it, and laugh at it, and tell it to the children, so they will know.” She clicked her beak. “Otherwise they will grow up thinking that only grand things matter, and they will spend their whole lives waiting for storms, and never once notice the fly.”

The old shell was quiet a while.

“You are a terrible old woman,” it said at last.

“I am a grandmother,” said the grandmother. “It is the same thing.” Click.

And far out past the breakwater, far below the long white line of the reef, in the dark where the light gives up, something very old and very large was coiled around a black rock that was once fire. It was not sleeping. For the third time that day, very slowly, so slowly that only the smallest fish nearby could feel it, it was shaking with something that might, in a creature so old and so grave, be called laughter.

• Segment 20: A Bargain With a Fish

It is a truth well known to every harbor master who has ever kept a harbor, though seldom set down in any of the Statutes, that there is no week in the month more dangerous to the good order of a port than the week of Passion.

The week of Darkness is dangerous, certainly, with its cold and its eclipse and its storms from the east. The week of Warming is dangerous, with its heat and its quarrels and its soft tar. The week of Buzzing is dangerous, with its flies, as the reader has lately had occasion to learn. But all these dangers can be seen coming, and provided against, and entered in a ledger. The dangers of the week of Passion cannot. They creep up on a harbor softly, in the evenings, along the wharves and in the doorways of the taverns. They get into the young men and the young women and some who are neither young nor in any position to know better. Before anyone has noticed, the whole port is at sixes and sevens: watches neglected, cargoes misloaded, mooring lines tied in bows, and the harbor master’s office besieged by persons seeking permission to marry on the deck of a fishing smack at Helios up.

Old Dunmoor Saltbeard had kept the harbor of Saltcoil through five hundred and eighty-odd weeks of Passion. He disapproved of every one of them.

He disapproved of the week of Passion in the month of Tyrus, in the year 8612a, more than any of the others. And he had, it must be said, a particular reason.

He had resolved, at the end of the week of Buzzing, to withdraw.

The reader will recall certain events of the preceding weeks. There was the touching of the hat on the first morning of Tyrus. There was the descent from the step to the foot of the central wharf on the fourth. There was the clapping on the fourteenth, four times or five, before five hundred witnesses. And there was the regrettable affair of the fly on the twenty-fifth, after which the harbor master had been heard by his clerk, through the bruise-blue door, making for some minutes a sound like barrels rolling down a gangplank. All of these had been observed. All of them had been talked of, along the wharves and in the taverns and at the fish market, with a freedom the harbor master found intolerable. And on the evening of the twenty-sixth, passing along the farthest wharf on his way home, he had come upon a row of children sitting on the edge of the boards. They were playing a game. In the game one child was the serpent woman, and hung by its teeth from a coil of soft rope held out over the water by two others. Another child, the smallest, was the harbor master. It stood at one end of the row with its arms folded so tightly across its chest that it could barely breathe and its face screwed up into a ferocious scowl. At intervals it said, in a deep gruff voice that it had plainly practiced: Harrumph. I disapprove. And then it unfolded its arms and clapped, four times, and folded them again, and the other children shrieked with laughter.

The harbor master had passed by without a word. But that night, sitting in his narrow room above the chandler’s shop on Wharf Street, he had made a resolution. He would no longer stand at the foot of the central wharf at Helios up. He would no longer descend from his step. He would observe the condition of the harbor at Helios up from his office, through his window, with his spyglass, as befitted a harbor master and as he had done for forty-seven years before the month of Tyrus. And he would enter what he saw in his ledger, as was his duty, and nothing else. He would not be a spectacle. He would not be a game for children. He would restore, by an act of will, the proper distance between himself and the disorder of the world. He would fold his arms, and keep them folded, and the wall would hold.

It was this resolution that placed him, on the morning of Abjursday, the third day of the week of Passion, the thirty-first of Tyrus, at the small round window of the harbor office. He sat on his high stool with the green canvas Ledger of Arrivals open on the desk before him, a pen in his hand, and his brass spyglass of the Long Squint pressed to his right eye. And so it came about that he witnessed, at a distance of four hundred and twelve yards, through a tube of brass, the most ridiculous thing that had ever happened in the harbor of Saltcoil.

But we must go back a little, to the first day of the week, so that the reader may understand how it came to happen.

The reader has met the young sailor, Jory Penhallow, ordinary seaman of the Prosperous Aunt. He was the cocky, freckle-faced, sunburnt youth who had come into the harbor office on the seventh day of Dimming in Lathandus. He had asked about a prize for climbing to the main truck and been sent away with a flea in his ear. He had brought the serpent woman a cup of water on the deck after her fall. He had sat beside her three days on the old sea wall and said nothing. And every morning since the first of Tyrus he had gathered up the coins thrown at her, in his cap, and carried them for her to the gnome’s shop in Ropewalk Lane.

He was nineteen years old. He was a native of Saltcoil, a fisherman’s son, not a new one, not filled. He had been at sea since he was twelve. He had never in his life, he afterwards told the harbor master, been in love with anybody, unless one counted a girl in a port to the south who had sold him an orange. He did not count her.

He had been in love with the serpent woman since the first morning of Tyrus.

The harbor master had not noticed. He did not, as a rule, notice such things, regarding them as outside the proper concerns of a harbor. But he noticed on the first day of the week of Passion. He could not have helped noticing, for on that morning Jory Penhallow came down Ropewalk Lane behind the serpent woman, a little before Helios up, carrying flowers.

They were the last of the purple flowers from the high slopes of the hills, the ones that had rolled over the ridges like a sea in the week of Blooming and were now going brown. He had climbed up in the dark to pick them, at three in the morning, the harbor master later learned, and come down again with his trousers torn and his arms scratched. He carried them in both hands before him in a great untidy armful like a man carrying a baby he is afraid to drop. When the serpent woman reached the Prosperous Aunt and went up the gangplank, he followed her. When she went to the foot of the mainmast and put her hands on it, he stepped forward and held out the flowers.

The harbor master saw this through his spyglass, from his office, and entered it in the margin of the ledger.

8612a3.5.1. Conjursday. Passion.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Twenty-ninth day. Observed from office window, as is proper. Penhallow, ordinary seaman, P. Aunt, presented her before the climb with a quantity of purple heather from the hills, considerably wilted. She took it. Looked at it some time. Then laid it carefully on the deck at the foot of the mast and climbed. When she came down she picked it up again and carried it away to the gnome’s shop. Penhallow stood at the foot of the mast after she had gone for some minutes, looking at the place where it had lain. I do not like the look of this.

8612a3.5.2. Evoday. Passion.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Thirtieth day. Penhallow did not stand his watch aboard the P. Aunt last night from midnight to four. Larkspur reports he was found at four o’clock sitting on the cobbles of Ropewalk Lane outside the gnome’s shop, writing something on a piece of paper by the light of the lamp in the gnome’s window. When asked what he was writing he said it was a poem. Larkspur docked him a day’s pay. Penhallow said he didn’t care. Larkspur says he has never in twenty-two years heard an ordinary seaman say he didn’t care about a day’s pay and mean it. This morning Penhallow did not gather the coins in his cap after she came down. He stood at the foot of the mast looking up the whole time she hung, with his cap in his hands, and when she came down he did not move, and the cabin boy had to gather them instead. I do not like the look of this at all. It is the week of Passion. I disapprove.

And on the evening of Evoday the harbor master had a visitor.

It was Tibbet Gearwhistle, the gnome, of Ropewalk Lane. He came to the bruise-blue door at a little after seven, which was most unusual, since he did not as a rule leave his shop after Helios down except for the purpose of standing on his roof. He came in without knocking and stood on the mat with his goggles pushed up on his forehead and his arms folded. In this posture he so closely resembled the harbor master that Quillimore Drabb, on his low stool, was obliged to look very hard at the Ledger of Fees to keep his countenance.

“Harbor Master,” said the gnome.

“Gnome,” said the harbor master.

“I have come,” said the gnome, “on a matter of commerce, which I believe may give rise to a disturbance of the peace of the harbor. I consider it my duty as a citizen to report it.”

The harbor master unfolded his arms just long enough to gesture at the low stool by the stove, which the gnome declined, and folded them again.

“This afternoon,” said the gnome, “at seventeen minutes past three, I received a commission from Penhallow, ordinary seaman of the Prosperous Aunt. He wished me to make a ring. A ring of plain silver, of the simplest pattern, to be ready by four o’clock tomorrow morning. I told him that was impossible. He said that I had made the serpent’s caps in two days, and a ring was a much smaller thing, and he would pay double. I asked him what size. He did not know. I asked him whose finger it was for. He went very red and said it was for a serpent’s. I asked which serpent. He went redder and said I knew perfectly well which serpent. I said that I did not make rings to fit the fingers of customers I had not measured. He said that she slept in my back room behind the forge, and could I not measure her finger while she slept. I said that I did not measure the fingers of sleeping customers without their consent, as it was improper. He said, then guess.” The gnome paused, and his face did something complicated under the goggles. “I guessed. I have seen her hands a great deal, at the fitting. I believe I guessed correctly. The ring is made. It is on my bench. He will collect it at four o’clock.” He unfolded his arms and folded them again. “I have reason to believe he intends to give it to her tomorrow morning at Helios up, at the top of the mast, in front of the whole harbor.”

There was a long silence in the harbor office.

“While she is hanging,” said the harbor master.

“While she is hanging,” said the gnome.

“By her teeth.”

“By her teeth,” said the gnome. “At the truck of the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt. A hundred and forty-one feet and three inches above the waterline, by my measurement. Spinning at one turn a second, at its fastest. With five hundred people watching.” He paused. “I thought you should know. In case of disturbance.”

The harbor master looked at the gnome for a long time over his folded arms. The gnome looked back at the harbor master over his.

“Why did you make the ring?” said the harbor master at last.

The gnome’s face did the complicated thing again.

“It was a commission,” he said. “I do not refuse commissions. And he paid double.” He turned to the door. “Good evening, Harbor Master.”

“Good evening, Gnome.”

The gnome went out. Quillimore Drabb, on his low stool, sighed for the first time in some weeks: a long, slow, tremulous sigh, like a kettle on a very low fire. The harbor master looked at him sharply.

“Clerk,” he said. “What is the meaning of that?”

“Nothing, sir,” sighed Drabb. “It’s only the week of Passion, sir.”

The harbor master did not sleep well that night.

And so we come to the morning of Abjursday, the thirty-first of Tyrus, and the harbor master at his small round window with his spyglass at his eye and his pen in his hand.

He had arrived at the office at a quarter to four, an hour before Helios up. He had lit the stove and the lamp and polished his buttons, left row first, top to bottom. He had opened the ledger and written the date at the head of the page. And then he had pulled his high stool round so that it faced the window, which it had never done in forty-seven years, and sat on it. He had fixed the spyglass on the deck of the Prosperous Aunt and not moved since.

“You will tell me, Clerk,” he said, without taking his eye from the glass, “the moment anything occurs that I cannot see.”

“Yes, sir,” said Drabb. He had arrived at half past four that morning, an hour earlier than his custom, without explanation. He now stood at the open bruise-blue door, looking down the central wharf toward the gathering crowd.

It was a mild morning, soft and gray, with a little breeze off the land. The breeze carried down from the hills the last faint scent of the purple flowers and laid it over the harbor like a shawl. The crowd was very large. It was larger than it had been since the morning of the fly, which had been talked of all over the city and had brought out many who had not come before. Through his spyglass the harbor master could see all the usual faces. Mister Fettle was at his table on Wharf Street, directly beneath the office window. His slate that morning read: THIRTY-ONE DAYS. FALL BY END OF MONTH, TEN TO ONE AGAINST. ALSO: WILL SHE SAY YES? EVENS. The harbor master observed this and closed his eyes briefly. Beside Mister Fettle stood the Widow Pellingworth. She was standing, the harbor master could not help noticing, rather closer to Mister Fettle than was strictly necessary, and every so often she said something to him behind her hand that made him go even redder than usual and quiver. Mister Thrupp was at his brazier, selling not only hot nuts but small paper cones of crystallized sugar, which he had made, he said, in honor of the serpent woman’s sugar clouds. Merran of the Gull’s Daughter was there, with her uncle Brek and her husband. Her husband, the harbor master saw with some astonishment, was holding her hand. The tall heron-folk boy Tadge Weatherby was running up and down the wharf, crying, not she’s going up! but he’s going to ask! he’s going to ask her! And behind the stack of crates by Hollin’s warehouse, the gnome, with his goggles down and his arms folded, was pretending not to be there.

Everybody knew. Of course everybody knew. A thing that is known to a gnome and a harbor master and a mate and a cabin boy at seven o’clock in the evening in Saltcoil is known to the whole city by midnight. And here they all were, five hundred of them and more, in the soft gray before dawn of the week of Passion, waiting to see a young sailor propose marriage to a serpent woman while she hung by her teeth from the main truck of the tallest ship in the harbor.

The harbor master thought it the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard of. He thought it was precisely the kind of disorder he had spent forty-one years building a wall against. A young man, neglecting his duties and making a spectacle of himself before the whole port, for the sake of a woman who was not even, by any reasonable definition, the same kind of creature as himself, and who could not possibly answer him, since her mouth was full of rope. He thought it was foolish. He thought it was improper. He thought it was very likely dangerous. He thought that he would very much like to stop it, and he had looked, for some hours in the night, through all four volumes of the Statutes of the Harbor of Saltcoil for a line that would let him. There was no line. There is no line in any statute anywhere against a man asking a woman a question.

And he thought, too, sitting at his window with his spyglass at his eye, of something else. He did not wish to think of it, and he could not stop.

He thought of a ropemaker’s daughter.

Her name had been Hester Gorse. She had been twenty-four when he was thirty-six, with dark hair and quick brown hands hard with rope calluses from her father’s ropewalk, and a laugh like a bell. She had been the elder sister of a thin, quick, laughing boy of thirteen called Tamlin, who had no fear of heights at all because he had never fallen. And in the spring of the year 8571a, the year of the Festival of Ropes, a young deputy harbor master full of new notions had meant to ask her to marry him. He had meant to ask her at the festival. He had bought a ring from the old silversmith who had the shop in Ropewalk Lane before the gnome came. He had carried it in his waistcoat pocket all that day. He had meant to ask her in the evening, after the climbing contest, when the lamps were lit on the wharves and the fiddlers were playing.

He had not asked her. By the evening of the Festival of Ropes her brother was in the water between the hull of the Fair Exchange and the dock. Dunmoor had dived and dived for him in that terrible narrow dark until they pulled him out by the beard. After that he could not look at her. He could not look at her because the festival had been his notion, and the climbing his permission, and the boy her brother. She did not blame him. He knew that. She had come to him a month later, on his father’s step, and said so, with her quick brown hands clasped together and her eyes very bright. He had not been able to answer her. He had folded his arms and looked at the harbor and said nothing at all. And after a while she had gone away. The next spring she sailed for one of the islands to the south and married a cooper there, he heard, and had five children, and he never saw her again.

He had kept the ring. It was in a small wooden box at the back of the drawer of his desk, beneath the black ledger, where he had not looked at it in forty-one years.

He was not thinking about it. He wished that to be understood. He was observing the condition of the harbor at Helios up, through his spyglass, from his office, as was proper.

The serpent woman came down Ropewalk Lane.

The crowd parted for her and called her name, as it did every morning. But there was a different note in it that morning, the harbor master observed: a rising, teasing, half-hushed note. And then, behind her, a little way back, came Jory Penhallow. He wore his best shore-going jacket, which was too small for him, and his hair was slicked down flat with water so that it shone, and his face was white under the freckles. In his hand, held so tightly that his knuckles showed white even through the spyglass at four hundred and twelve yards, he carried a small thing that caught the gray light and flashed.

The crowd made a sound like a wave going out over shingle.

She went up the gangplank. She nodded to Mister Larkspur at the rail, who did not, the harbor master saw, have a splinter in his teeth that morning, which was without precedent. She went to the foot of the mainmast and put her hands on it and looked up. She did not, so far as the harbor master could see, look round at the young sailor coming up the gangplank behind her. Whether she knew what was coming he could not tell. Everybody else did.

She coiled. She climbed.

The crowd laughed at the coiling, as it always did, but not very loudly. It was waiting. At the main top she waved, and they cheered, but not very loudly. They were waiting. She went on up past the topsail yard and the topgallant yard to the truck. She took the halyard in her teeth and let go and hung, and the crowd fell silent, as it always did. And she began to spin.

And Jory Penhallow, ordinary seaman, walked out across the deck of the Prosperous Aunt to the foot of the mainmast. He stood there with his head tipped back and his cap in one hand and the small flashing thing in the other, and he looked up.

The harbor master, at his window, found that his pen had made a small blot on the page of the ledger. He did not move it.

The serpent woman spun. Faster and faster, the green blur at the top of the mast, with the gray light streaming off her. The silence on the wharf was very deep. At the top of the spin she stopped, as she always did, and spread her arms, and looked down.

And she saw him.

The harbor master could not see her face. At a hundred and forty feet up and four hundred and twelve yards away, even through the spyglass of the Long Squint, her face was a small green oval, nothing more. But he saw her body change. He saw it go still in a different way from the usual stillness at the top of the spin. It was not the stillness of a performer holding a pose. It was the stillness of a person who has looked down and seen something they did not expect.

And Jory Penhallow, at the foot of the mast, opened his mouth and called up to her.

The harbor master could not hear it. He was four hundred and twelve yards away, behind a pane of glass, in an office that smelled of damp ledgers. He could only see the young sailor’s mouth moving, and his face going from white to red, and his arm going up with the small flashing thing held high over his head, as high as he could reach, toward the top of the mast. And he could see the crowd. Five hundred faces turned not up to the serpent woman now but down, to the foot of the mast, to the young sailor in his too-small jacket with his arm in the air. Every one of them had its mouth open. And then, as the young sailor finished calling up, every one of those five hundred faces turned back again, all at once, up to the top of the mast, and waited.

“Clerk,” said the harbor master, hoarsely. “What did he say? What did he say?”

Quillimore Drabb, at the open door, turned round. His large wet eyes were larger and wetter than the harbor master had ever seen them.

“I couldn’t hear, sir,” he said. “It’s too far. But they’re passing it up the wharf, sir. Listen.”

And the harbor master listened. Through the open door, down the length of the central wharf, from mouth to mouth, from the deck of the Prosperous Aunt to the cobbles of Wharf Street, came the young sailor’s words. They came the way rumor comes along a wharf, passed from one person to the next. Each person said it to the one behind, a little louder, a little changed. It came rippling up the wharf toward the office like a wave coming up a beach.

“He said,” said somebody far down the wharf.

“He said, Velisse,” said somebody nearer.

“He said, Velisse, I love you!” said somebody nearer still. A woman shrieked, and somebody laughed, and somebody said, hush!

“He said, Velisse, I love you, come down and marry me!”

“He said, come down and marry me, and I’ll give up the sea!”

“He said he’d give up the sea and work in the ropewalk and build her a house on the hill with a mast in the garden!”

“With a mast in the garden!” said Mister Fettle, directly beneath the office window. The Widow Pellingworth hit him on the arm and then, inexplicably, burst into tears and leaned her head on his shoulder. Mister Fettle quivered all over like a jelly in an earthquake and did not know where to put his hands.

The harbor master did not move. He had his spyglass at his eye and his pen in his hand. His arms, so far as a man can fold his arms while holding a spyglass to his eye with one hand and a pen with the other, were folded.

At the top of the mast the serpent woman hung, still, with her arms spread, looking down.

And then, very slowly, she spoke.

The harbor master saw it. He saw, through the spyglass, the small green oval of her face move, and her body move, the way a person’s body moves when they speak, a little lift of the shoulders, a little forward lean. She did not open her mouth. She could not. Her mouth was closed on the halyard, every green fang and silver tip of it. But she spoke anyway, through her teeth, as the harbor master had seen her lips move every morning at the top of the spin. And whatever she said, it went down the mast to the young sailor at the foot of it. It went along the deck of the Prosperous Aunt to the rail, and down the gangplank, and onto the wharf. And from there, from mouth to mouth, the words came rippling up the central wharf toward the bruise-blue door of the harbor office, like a wave coming up a beach.

“She said,” said somebody far down the wharf.

“She said, I can’t,” said somebody nearer.

“She said, I can’t come down!” A low murmur went through the crowd, a long sigh like wind in the rigging.

“She said, I can’t come down, Jory, I’m sorry,” said somebody nearer still.

“She said, I can’t come down, I’ve got a bargain,” said somebody nearer still.

“She said, I’ve got a bargain with a fishwife!” said somebody very near indeed, and somebody else said no, you fool, with a fish, a fish! And the crowd beneath the office window broke into confusion. Some said fishwife and some said fish, and Mister Thrupp the nut seller said, with great authority, that he had heard it quite clearly, and it was a fish-hook.

“Clerk,” said the harbor master, through his teeth. “Clerk. What did she say?”

Quillimore Drabb had gone out of the door. He was standing in the middle of the cobbles of Wharf Street, in the middle of the crowd, with his thin coat flapping and his large wet eyes streaming. For the first time in nineteen years of service he had left his post without being told. He was asking the people around him, one after another: what did she say, what did she say exactly? And then, at last, he came back to the door. He stood on the mat and looked at the harbor master on his high stool by the window with his spyglass at his eye. When he spoke, his soft apologetic voice, which made everything sound like a confession, made this sound like the most important confession in the world.

“She said, sir,” said Quillimore Drabb. “She said: I cannot come down. I have a bargain with a fish.”

The harbor master lowered his spyglass.

There was a silence in the harbor office. Outside the bruise-blue door the crowd was still murmuring: fish, she said fish, a bargain with a fish. Somebody was laughing, and somebody was crying, and somebody was saying, what fish? what does she mean, what fish? And somebody else, an old voice, a fisherman’s, was saying: the Reef Viper, you fool, she means the Reef Viper, everybody knows.

The harbor master sat on his high stool. He looked out of the small round window at the top of the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt. The serpent woman had begun to spin again, slowly. She spun all the way up to the top again, and stopped, and spread her arms, and held the stillness a second time, which she had never done before. Then she began to come down.

A bargain with a fish.

It was the most ridiculous thing the harbor master had ever heard. It was more ridiculous than the gulls having no hands. It was more ridiculous than the coins being a gift and not a sale, more ridiculous than the hot nuts on Wharf Street and the bookmaking and the children with their washing lines. A serpent woman, hanging by her teeth from a mast, refusing an offer of marriage from a perfectly respectable young sailor of good family. A young man with a house on the hill with a mast in the garden, who would give up the sea for her. And her reason was that she had a bargain with a fish.

He ought to have laughed. He wanted to laugh. He could feel the laugh somewhere down in his barrel of a chest, the barrels beginning to roll. And he could not laugh, because there was something in his throat in the way.

For he had understood her. That was the thing. He had understood her perfectly, the moment Quillimore Drabb said it, and he wished with all his heart that he had not.

She had made a promise. That was all it was. She had given her word to someone, or something, that she would do a thing. Climb that mast every morning for forty-nine days, and hang, and not fall, for reasons of her own that nobody in Saltcoil understood. And she had kept her word. She had kept it through the cold and the heat and the burning rope and the blood. She had kept it through a fly up her nose. She had kept it for thirty-one days. And now, on the thirty-first, a young man had stood at the foot of the mast and offered her everything a young man can offer: his love, his house, his whole life. And she had said no. Not because she did not want it. She might want it very much, for all the harbor master knew. She had said no because she had made a promise, and the promise came first, and she would not break it. Not for love. Not for anything.

I cannot come down. I have a bargain.

There is no line for that in any ledger. There is no statute for it, nor any rule. And yet the harbor master understood it better than he had understood anything in forty-one years. He had made a promise too, once. He had made it to himself, to a dead boy, to the black water between the hull and the dock. He had promised that no one would ever climb again in his harbor for a wager or a lark or a dare. He had kept it. He had kept it for forty-one years, with his arms folded. And for the sake of it he had stood on his father’s step one evening a month after the festival, with a ring in his waistcoat pocket, and said nothing at all to a dark-haired young woman with quick brown hands. He had let her walk away.

Had that been a bargain with a fish?

He did not know. He sat on his high stool with the spyglass in his lap and his eyes on the window, and for a long moment he did not know anything at all.

The serpent woman came down. The harbor master raised the spyglass again, though he had told himself he would not, and watched her come down onto the deck of the Prosperous Aunt. He watched her go across the deck to the foot of the mainmast, where the young sailor still stood with his cap in one hand and the small flashing thing in the other, and his face red and wet. He watched her coil herself down on the deck before him so that her head was at the height of his, as she had coiled herself down on the cobbles of Tanner’s Yard for the children. He watched her reach out one long green hand and touch his face. Very gently. As one touches the face of a child, or of someone one is very fond of and must disappoint.

He could not hear what she said. He was glad he could not.

He watched the young sailor nod, once, and then again. He watched him put the small flashing thing back in his pocket. He watched him put his cap on, and turn, and walk away across the deck and down the gangplank and along the wharf toward the city. The crowd parted for him in silence. Nobody laughed. Nobody said a word. A great many of them, the harbor master observed, were crying, including Mister Fettle, who had wagered evens on yes and lost, and did not seem to mind.

And the serpent woman stayed coiled on the deck at the foot of the mast for a long while after he had gone. The coins that had been thrown at her lay all round her on the oak, and nobody gathered them up.

The harbor master put the spyglass down on the desk. He picked up his pen. He looked at the margin of the ledger, where the small blot was, and wrote:

8612a3.5.3. Abjursday. Passion.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Thirty-first day. Penhallow asked her to marry him, at the foot of the mast, while she hung. She said she could not come down, because she has a bargain with a fish. Penhallow went away. I disapprove

And he stopped, with the pen on the paper.

He looked at the words a long time. Then he put a line through I disapprove, very neatly, a single straight stroke. He blotted it and closed the ledger and sat with his hands on the cover. He did not fold his arms. He found that he did not want to, and he did not know why, and he found that this frightened him more than anything that had happened in the month of Tyrus.

The next morning, Transmuday, the thirty-second of Tyrus, Jory Penhallow came to the harbor office.

He came at ten o’clock, which was the usual hour for sailors seeking to change their articles. He stood on the mat with his cap in his hands and his face very pale and very steady. He said that he had been released from the Prosperous Aunt by Mister Larkspur at his own request. He had signed on with Captain Orrin Vask of the ketch Frostwind, sailing for the islands to the north on the evening tide of Divinday, and he wished to have the change entered in the harbor’s books, as the law required.

The harbor master looked at him a long while over his folded arms. He had folded them again that morning, out of habit. He did not find them as comfortable as they had been.

“The northern islands,” he said. “That is a long voyage. Captain Vask will not be back in Saltcoil before Kelemus at the earliest. Perhaps not before the new year.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jory Penhallow.

“You will miss,” said the harbor master, and stopped, and began again. “You will not see the end of the month. Of the forty-nine days.”

“No, sir,” said Jory Penhallow. “That’s why I’m going, sir.”

The harbor master was silent.

“I can’t watch her, sir,” said Jory Penhallow, very quietly. “Not every morning. Not now. I thought I could, last night, and then this morning I went down to the wharf at Helios up, and I saw her go up, and I couldn’t. I had to go away. I can’t stand there under her every morning and look up and know.” He turned his cap round in his hands. “She was kind about it, sir. She was very kind. She said it wasn’t anything to do with me, and it wasn’t that she didn’t care, and if it had been another time and another life, and if she hadn’t promised… But she has promised. And she won’t break it. And I wouldn’t want her to.” He looked up at the harbor master with his freckled face. “I wouldn’t love her if she would, sir. Do you understand?”

The harbor master looked at him for a long time.

“I understand,” he said.

He entered the change in the books himself, in his small square upright hand, in the Ledger of Fees and the crew lists. He did not give it to Quillimore Drabb. When it was done, Jory Penhallow thanked him and put on his cap and went to the door. On the mat he stopped and turned back and took from his pocket the small flashing thing. It was a ring of plain silver, of the simplest pattern, made by a gnome who had guessed the size of a serpent’s finger. He held it out.

“Would you keep this, sir?” he said. “In your office? I can’t take it to sea. And I can’t give it to her. And I can’t throw it away. I thought, if anyone would keep a thing safe, it would be you.”

The harbor master looked at the ring. He did not move for some time. Then he unfolded his arms, and took it, and put it in his waistcoat pocket.

“I will keep it,” he said.

On the evening of Divinday, the fifth day of the week of Passion, the thirty-third of Tyrus, the ketch Frostwind sailed from Saltcoil on the evening tide for the islands to the north.

The harbor master saw her go. He stood on his step with his arms folded, where he had stood for forty-seven years to watch ships go out, and watched her cast off from the inner wharf. She warped out past the Prosperous Aunt and the trade ships, past the end of the farthest wharf, where an old shellback grandmother sat on the last piling and lifted one flipper-hand as she went by. She went out through the gap in the breakwater into the open sea. Her sails filled with the evening wind, gold in the last light of Helios, and she leaned over and went away north, smaller and smaller, until she was only a speck, and then nothing.

He had seen, through his spyglass, before she sailed, a young sailor at her rail, looking back. Not at the wharf, nor at the city. At the top of the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt, empty in the evening, with the halyard swinging. He had seen, too, a little earlier, the old shellback grandmother come slowly along the inner wharf with her staff and stop at the foot of the Frostwind’s gangplank, and the young sailor come down to her. He had seen her press something into his hand, something small, wrapped in a scrap of damp kelp. The young sailor had looked at it, and then at her, and then closed his hand round it and put it inside his shirt, against his chest. The harbor master did not know what it was. He did not ask.

He went back inside. He sat down on his high stool, opened the brown canvas Ledger of Departures, and wrote the departure of the Frostwind, as was his duty. Ketch Frostwind, Capt. Orrin Vask, for the northern islands, cargo salt and enamel, crew eleven. And then, below it, as the law required, the list of crew. And among them, the last name, newly signed on:

J. Penhallow, ord. seaman, late of the P. Aunt.

He looked at it a long time.

Then, in the margin of the Ledger of Departures, where he had never written anything in forty-seven years, he wrote, very small:

He did not care about the day’s pay. He would have built her a house on the hill with a mast in the garden. She said no because she had made a promise and would not break it, and he loved her for it, and went to sea. I have kept this harbor forty-seven years and I have never seen a braver thing done on it by anyone, except perhaps by her.

He stopped. He found, to his very great embarrassment, that his squinted eye was wet, and that his nose required attention. He took out the cloth he kept in his left pocket for polishing his buttons and used it for the purpose, which he had never done before. He hoped Quillimore Drabb, on the low stool by the stove, had not noticed. Quillimore Drabb had noticed, and was looking very hard at the Ledger of Fees.

“Clerk,” said the harbor master, rather thickly.

“Sir,” said Drabb, not looking up.

“This is the week of Passion, Clerk.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have always disapproved of the week of Passion.”

“Yes, sir.”

The harbor master was silent a while.

“It is foolish,” he said. “It is disorderly. It makes young men neglect their watches and young women weep on wharves. It makes bookmakers quiver and widows lean on their shoulders. It fills my office with persons wishing to marry on fishing smacks. It is unsafe, and improper, and there is no line for it in any ledger.”

“No, sir,” said Drabb softly.

The harbor master looked down at the page of the Ledger of Departures. He looked at the last name, J. Penhallow, ord. seaman, and at the small writing in the margin beside it. Then he put his hand into his waistcoat pocket and felt the plain silver ring there, small and cool. And he thought of another ring, in a small wooden box at the back of the drawer of his desk, beneath the black ledger. He had not looked at it in forty-one years.

He did not take it out. He wished that to be understood. He did not take it out, nor look at it, nor do anything with it at all. He only sat there on his high stool in the lamplight of the harbor office, with the plain silver ring in his pocket and the other one in the drawer. Through the small round window the evening came down over the harbor. Far away to the north a ketch was sailing into the dark with a young man at her rail and something small wrapped in kelp against his chest.

“It is foolish, Clerk,” said the harbor master again, very quietly.

“Yes, sir,” said Quillimore Drabb.

And for the second time that month, the clerk of the harbor office of Saltcoil looked up from his ledger and smiled. The harbor master saw him do it, and did not tell him to stop.

• • Segment 21: The Sailor Who Is Still at Sea

The week of Passion ends on Illusday, as every week ends on Illusday, and on the evening of that day the grandmothers of Saltcoil are always a little sad. They will not tell you why. If you ask them, they will say: oh, it is nothing, child, it is only the end of the week. And then they will look out at the sea for a while, and click their beaks, or sigh, or knit a little faster. And you will know that it is not nothing. But you will not know what it is.

I will tell you what it is. It is that the week of Passion is the week of love, and love, like the purple flowers on the hills, does not last. It comes up all at once in a great rush of color, so that the whole world seems to be changed by it. It rolls over the ridges like a sea and moves in the wind. And then, before you have properly looked at it, it begins to go brown at the edges, and the wind across it does not move it as it did, and in a few days it is gone. It comes back, of course. It always comes back, the next month and the next. But not the same. Never the same. The flowers that come back are new flowers. The ones you saw are gone forever.

That is why the grandmothers are sad on the evening of Illusday, at the end of the week of Passion. And that is why, on the evening of Illusday, the seventh day of the week of Passion in the month of Tyrus, in the year 8612a, the old grandmother on the last piling at the end of the farthest wharf in Saltcoil told the children the story of the sailor who is still at sea.

The children had come, as they came every evening now. There were fourteen of them that night, sitting in a row on the edge of the boards with their legs hanging over the water. Mirri was nearest the grandmother’s piling, as she always was, with the bandage gone from her chin now and only a small pink scar where it had been. The small boy who always sat at the end of the row was there; his name was Tobin, and he asked more questions than all the others together. And twelve more, from Tanner’s Yard and Bell Street and Ropewalk Lane, and two new ones from the hill who had heard about the stories and come down to see.

They were quiet that evening. Quieter than usual. They had all seen what happened on the morning of Abjursday, at the foot of the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt. They had seen the young sailor in his too-small jacket hold up the ring, and the serpent woman at the top of the mast go still. They had heard the words come rippling up the wharf from mouth to mouth: I cannot come down. I have a bargain with a fish. And they had seen the young sailor go away down the gangplank with his face wet, and the crowd part for him in silence. And on the evening of Divinday they had seen the Frostwind sail, with the young sailor at her rail, looking back.

So they did not ask for a funny story that evening. They did not ask about flies. They sat in their row and looked out at the sea, where the last of the light was going red over the water, and for a long while nobody said anything at all.

Then Mirri said: “Grandmother. What happened to Jory?”

The grandmother did not answer at once.

“He went to sea,” said Tobin, at the end of the row. “On the Frostwind. Everybody knows that. To the northern islands. I saw him go.”

“But what happens to him?” said Mirri. “After. Does he come back? Does he find somebody else? Does he forget her? Is he all right?” She turned and looked up at the grandmother. “You know. You always know. Tell us what happens to him.”

The grandmother looked down at her for a long while with her milky old eyes.

“It has not happened yet, child,” she said. “He only sailed two days ago. He is not even at the northern islands yet. Nobody knows what will happen to him.”

“You could tell us anyway,” said Mirri. “You could tell us what’s going to happen. Grandmothers can do that.”

“Can they?”

“Yes,” said Mirri firmly. “Grandmothers can tell things that haven’t happened yet. As long as they’re true.”

The grandmother clicked her beak. Then she laughed, a soft wheezing laugh, and patted Mirri on the head with her flipper-hand.

“Very well,” she said. “As long as it is true. I will tell you what happens to him. But I warn you, it is not a happy story. Nor is it a sad one, exactly. It is the other kind.”

“What other kind?” said Tobin.

“You will see,” said the grandmother. “Listen.”

There was once a young sailor called Jory, who was born in Saltcoil to a fisherman and a fisherman’s wife, and went to sea when he was twelve. He was a cocky young sailor, freckle-faced and sunburnt, with his cap on the back of his head and a grin that showed most of his teeth. He was not wicked, or cruel, or lazy, or any of the things sailors in stories usually are. He was only young, and sure of himself, and he had never been in love with anybody, unless one counted a girl in a port to the south who had sold him an orange.

And then, one morning in the month of Lathandus, he saw a serpent woman fall.

He was in the rigging of the Prosperous Aunt that morning, on the main yard, with the rest of the crew. He laughed at her when she tangled herself in the ratlines, and he laughed at her when she climbed like a sock up a broom handle. He laughed louder than anyone. And then she reached the top, and bit the rope, and let go, and spun. He saw her face. He was nearer to her than anyone in the whole harbor, on the main yard, only forty feet below her. He saw her face as she spun at the top of the mast in the gray light of that cold morning, and it was full of joy. Pure, plain, perfect joy, like a child’s on the first warm morning of spring. He had never seen anything like it in his life.

And then her tooth broke, and she fell, past him, close enough to touch. He heard the sound she made when she struck the deck. And he stopped laughing.

He did not know he loved her then. He only knew that he had to bring her a cup of water. So he did. And then he had to sit beside her on the old sea wall for three days and three nights and not say anything. So he did. And then he had to gather up her coins every morning in his cap and carry them to the gnome. So he did. And somewhere in all that, somewhere between the cup and the wall and the cap, he fell in love with her, the way you fall asleep: without noticing, until you are already there.

“Like falling off a mast,” said Tobin.

“No,” said the grandmother. “Falling off a mast, you notice.” Click.

He loved her for thirty-one days. He loved her through the cold and the heat and the purple hills and the fly. Every morning he stood at the foot of the mast and looked up at her and thought she was the most wonderful thing in the whole wide world. And then the week of Passion came, as it does every month. The week of Passion gets into the young men and the young women and makes them do brave foolish things. It got into Jory. He climbed the hills in the dark and picked her flowers, and sat outside the gnome’s shop all night writing her a poem, and paid the gnome double to make her a ring. And on the morning of Abjursday he stood at the foot of the mast, while she hung there by her teeth at the very top, and asked her to marry him.

“And she said no,” said Mirri quietly.

“She said no,” said the grandmother. “She said: I cannot come down. I have a bargain with a fish.”

The children were quiet.

“Was it because she didn’t love him?” said one of the new children from the hill, a girl with long ears.

The grandmother looked at her a long time.

“I do not know whether she loved him,” she said. “Nobody knows that but her, and perhaps not even her. She is a strange creature, the serpent woman. She has two lives in her, the one she remembers from the other world and the one she has in this, and they are wound together like the strands of a rope. It may be that one of them loved him and the other did not. It may be that both of them did, a little, and neither of them could. It may be that she loves the air too much to love anybody who stands on the ground.” She clicked her beak. “But that is not why she said no.”

“Then why?”

“Because he asked at the wrong time,” said the grandmother.

And she was quiet for a while, looking out at the sea.

“Listen,” she said at last. “I will tell you a thing about love that nobody tells young people, because it is sad, and people do not like to tell young people sad things. But you are old enough. Here it is: it is not enough to love someone. It is not enough even for them to love you back. It must also be the right time. And very often, much more often than you would think, it is not.”

The children stared at her.

“Think of the flowers,” said the grandmother. “The purple flowers Jory picked for her on the first morning of the week of Passion. Do you remember them?”

“He climbed up the hill in the dark,” said Mirri. “And tore his trousers.”

“He did. And he came down with his arms full of them. A great untidy armful, like a baby. And she took them and looked at them and laid them on the deck at the foot of the mast, and when she came down she picked them up and carried them away.” The grandmother leaned forward on her staff. “But do you know what they were? Those flowers?”

“Purple,” said Tobin.

“They were going brown,” said the grandmother. “They were the last of the purple flowers on the hills. The week of Blooming was over. The great flowering had passed. Jory climbed up in the dark and picked the very last ones, the ones at the very top of the ridge where the cold had kept them a little longer than the rest. By the time he gave them to her they were already going brown at the edges. She took them anyway, and put them in water in a jar on the gnome’s forge, and they lasted two days. And then they were dry. The gnome says they are hanging upside down from a nail above the forge now, gray and dusty, and she will not let him throw them away.”

The grandmother sat back.

“That is what Jory’s love was,” she said. “The right flowers at the wrong time. If he had picked them a week earlier, at the height of the flowering, they would have been the most beautiful thing in the world. But he did not see her a week earlier, or he did not know he loved her yet, or he was too shy to climb the hill. And by the time he did, the flowering was over, and she had made a promise, and the promise came first.” Click. “It was not anybody’s fault. It is nobody’s fault, when it happens. It is only the way of things. The flowers come up and go brown, and the right time comes and goes, and very often we are looking the other way.”

The children were very quiet. The sea was going from red to gray. The first lamps were coming on in the windows behind them. The pilings creaked softly, and the ropes sighed, and the old horn-shell on its iron straps hummed.

“So what happens to him?” said Mirri again, in a very small voice. “Now?”

“Now,” said the grandmother, “he goes to sea.”

The Frostwind sails north. North and north, out past the breakwater, past the reef where the water breaks white, past the last of the islands of Lapita. Out into the open sea, where the water goes from green to gray to a cold dark blue. The wind comes down from the north with ice in it. Captain Orrin Vask stands at the wheel, shivering, as he always shivers. He came, long ago, from a cold world of snow, and now wears the body of a gray-scaled lizard-folk, and has never been warm since. Jory stands his watches and hauls his lines and climbs the rigging when he is told. He does not laugh as much as he used to. He does not grin, or wear his cap on the back of his head. But he works hard and well, and Captain Vask is pleased with him.

And every morning, at Helios up, Jory looks up.

He does it without meaning to. He wakes in his hammock in the forecastle in the cold gray before dawn and goes up on deck. As Helios climbs out of the sea, like a wet dog, as it does even in the north, and shakes itself, and spatters the gray waves with gold, he looks up at the mainmast of the Frostwind. At the very top of it, at the truck, where the signal halyard runs through its block and hangs, swaying. There is nothing there, of course. There never is. It is only a mast, with a rope at the top of it, swaying in the north wind. But he looks anyway. Every morning. And for a moment, just for a moment, at the very instant of looking, before he knows that there is nothing there, he hopes.

That is all. He does not expect anything. He is not a fool. He knows she is in Saltcoil, a thousand miles to the south, hanging by her teeth from the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt. She is not on the Frostwind and never will be. But he looks up anyway, and for one moment he hopes. Then he looks down again and goes about his work.

“Is that sad?” said Tobin.

“Wait,” said the grandmother.

The Frostwind comes to the northern islands. They are cold, gray, rocky islands, where the people live in houses of stone with turf on the roofs, and the harbors are full of ice in winter. Jory goes ashore in the ports and walks along the wharves. And every morning, at Helios up, wherever he is, he looks up at the masts. At the masts of the fishing boats and the trade ships and the whalers in the frozen harbors. At the very tops of them, where the halyards hang. There is never anything there. Only ice, and gulls, and once a flag of green cloth, flapping, that makes his heart stop. He looks again and sees that it is only a flag, and he laughs at himself, out loud, standing alone on a frozen wharf in a strange port. The fishermen look at him oddly.

The Frostwind sails on, from the northern islands to the eastern, from the eastern to the western, wherever Captain Vask can find a cargo. Jory sails with her. He becomes an able seaman, and then a bosun’s mate, and then a bosun. His freckles fade a little in the cold, and his face grows lean and weathered, and there are lines at the corners of his eyes. He sees a great many ports and a great many harbors. And in every one of them, every morning, at Helios up, he looks up at the masts. And for one moment he hopes.

He does not go home. Not that year, nor the next. Captain Vask says to him once, kindly, in his cold-world voice: you could go home, lad. Saltcoil is only a thousand miles. You could be there by Kelemus. Jory says he knows. He says he will go home someday. But not yet. And Captain Vask, who understands about not going home, having come from a cold world of snow that he can never go back to, nods and says nothing more.

“Why doesn’t he go home?” said the long-eared girl from the hill. “If he could?”

“Because if he goes home,” said the grandmother, “he will have to stop looking up.”

The children did not understand. She could see it in their faces.

“Listen,” she said. “When you are in Saltcoil, where she is, you know what is at the top of the mast. You can see it. Every morning, there she is, the serpent woman, hanging by her teeth and spinning. And you know that she will never come down. You know she has made a promise and will keep it, and that when the forty-nine days are over she will go on doing whatever she does next, and none of it will have anything to do with you. There is no hope in Saltcoil. There is only knowing.”

She clicked her beak.

“But at sea,” she said, “a thousand miles away, in a strange port, on a frozen wharf, at Helios up, you look up at a mast. You do not know what is at the top of it. Not for that one moment, before you see. And so, for that one moment, it could be anything. It could be her.” She leaned forward on her staff. “Do you see? At sea he can still hope. Just a little. Just for a moment, every morning. And that little moment of hoping is the last of the flowers on the hill, the very last ones at the top of the ridge, where the cold has kept them. If he goes home, it goes brown. So he does not go home.” Click. “Not yet.”

The children were very quiet.

The years go by. They always do, in stories and out of them. Jory becomes a mate, and then, one day, a captain, with a ship of his own, a trim little brig called the Morning Truck. Nobody knows why he named her that, though sailors make jokes about it. He sails her up and down the world, carrying salt and enamel and furs and fish. His freckles are gone now, and his hair is going gray, and the lines at the corners of his eyes are deep. He does not grin any more. But he smiles sometimes, slowly, at nothing in particular, and the young sailors on his ship wonder what he is thinking of.

He does not marry. Or perhaps he does. Grandmothers are allowed to tell things that have not happened yet, so long as they are true. But they are not allowed to tell everything, and this I will not tell, because it is his and not mine. I will tell you only this. If he does marry, it is someone who understands that every morning at Helios up he will go out on deck and look up at the mast. She does not mind. She knows it is not her he is looking for. And she knows, too, that it does not take anything away from her. It is not a betrayal. It is only a man looking up at a mast for one moment every morning, and then looking down again, and coming in to breakfast.

And sometimes, when the young sailors on the Morning Truck are sitting on deck in the evening with their pipes, they ask him: Captain, why do you look up at the mast every morning? Is it the weather? Is it the rigging? Is it an old sailor’s superstition? And he takes his pipe out of his mouth and looks at them a long while. Then he tells them about a serpent woman who hung by her teeth from the mainmast of a ship in the harbor of Saltcoil for forty-nine days, a long time ago, when he was young. He tells them about the cold and the heat and the purple hills and the fly. He tells them about the morning he climbed the hill in the dark and picked her the last of the flowers and asked her to marry him, while she hung there at the top of the mast. And he tells them what she said.

“What did she say, Captain?” the young sailors ask.

“She said,” he tells them, “I cannot come down. I have a bargain with a fish.”

And the young sailors laugh, because it is a ridiculous thing to say, and they think he is making it up. And he lets them laugh. And when they have finished, he says: “I loved her for it.” And then he puts his pipe back in his mouth and looks out at the sea and says nothing more. And the young sailors stop laughing, and look at each other, and do not ask him anything else that evening.

The grandmother stopped.

The sea had gone gray. VaporSphere was coming up pale in the east. The lamps were all lit now in the windows of the city, and somewhere along the wharf a mother was calling a child’s name. None of the children moved.

“Is that the end?” said Tobin at last.

“Nearly,” said the grandmother.

“Does he ever come home?” said Mirri. “To Saltcoil? When he’s old?”

The grandmother was quiet a long while.

“The grandmothers of Saltcoil,” she said at last, slowly, “say that he is still at sea.”

“Still? Even when he’s very old?”

“Still,” said the grandmother. “Always. Ask any grandmother in Saltcoil, a hundred years from now, what became of the sailor who asked the serpent woman to marry him in the week of Passion. She will say: oh, he is still at sea, child. And when you ask her why, she will look out at the sea a while and click her beak and not tell you.”

“But you’ll tell us,” said Mirri. “Won’t you? Why they say it?”

And the grandmother looked down at her for a long while, with her milky old eyes, in the dusk.

Then, slowly, she unwound her long bracelet of beads from her wrist. Twelve times around it went now, and the end of it still hung down. She held it out in her flipper-hand so that the children could see. They leaned in close, all fourteen of them, their heads together, in the light of the lamps from the city behind.

“Do you know what this is?” said the grandmother.

“Your grandchildren,” said Mirri. “One bead for every grandchild. You told us.”

“One bead for every grandchild,” said the grandmother. “And some others.” She ran her clever old claws along the string, bead by bead, until she came to one near the end: a small round bead of pale green sea glass, the green of the sea when the light is in it. “This one is the serpent woman. I put it on the night I first saw her, wandering the wharf in the forgetting sickness. She is not my grandchild. Not yet.” Click.

Then her claws moved on, past the pale green bead, to the very end of the string. There was a new bead there, very small, tied on with a fresh knot. It was blue, a deep clear blue, the blue of the open sea far out beyond the reef, where the water goes dark.

“I put this one on the evening the Frostwind sailed,” said the grandmother.

“For Jory,” whispered Mirri.

“For Jory.”

The children looked at the small blue bead in the lamplight.

“Now listen,” said the grandmother. “This is the reason, and then you must go home. Every evening I sit on this piling and count the ships home. You have seen me do it. One, two, three, all thirty of the fishing fleet, the Gull’s Daughter and Patch-Upon-Patch and the Three Aunts and the rest. And then I count one more. Thirty-one. The Bright Morrow. Do you know about the Bright Morrow?”

“She’s the ship that never came back,” said Tobin. “Twenty years ago. Everybody knows.”

“She is the ship that never came back,” said the grandmother. “And I count her every evening, all the same. Because a ship that is no longer counted is lost. But a ship that is still counted, child, is only late.” Click. “And then I count thirty-two. The serpent woman. Because she arrived one evening, out of the sky, and somebody had to count her.”

She closed her flipper-hand over the bracelet, gently, over the pale green bead and the small blue one.

“And from now on,” said the grandmother, “every evening, I shall count thirty-three. The Frostwind. With a young sailor aboard her, at her rail, looking up at her mast at Helios up, hoping for one moment every morning. And when the Frostwind comes home, as she will, I shall count the Morning Truck instead. And when the Morning Truck comes home, if she ever does, I shall count whatever ship he is on next, or whatever he is doing, wherever he is. I shall count him. Every evening, for as long as I sit on this piling. And when I am gone, some other grandmother will sit here and count him for me, because I shall tell her to.” Click. “That is what grandmothers are for.”

She looked at the children, one by one, with her milky old eyes.

“And that,” she said softly, “is why the grandmothers say he is still at sea. Not because he never comes home. Perhaps he does. Perhaps he comes home an old man with gray hair and lines at his eyes and sits on the end of this wharf at Helios up and looks at the empty mast of some ship that is not the Prosperous Aunt. I do not know. But he is still at sea, because we are still counting him. And a sailor who is still counted is never lost. He is only out there somewhere, on the water, at Helios up, looking up at a mast. And for one moment, hoping.”

She wound the bracelet back round her wrist, twelve times, and tucked in the end.

“It is not a happy story,” she said. “And it is not a sad one. It is the other kind. It is the kind where something beautiful happens at the wrong time and is lost, and nobody is to blame, and the world goes on. And the loss is not quite a loss, because somebody remembers it, and counts it, and tells it to the children on the end of a wharf on the last evening of the week of Passion.” Click. “It is the kind of story the flowers on the hills would tell, if flowers could talk. The kind where you know from the beginning that it will not last, and you love it anyway, because it does not last, and because you know. That is the kind of story it is.”

The children sat very still in their row on the edge of the wharf, with their legs hanging over the dark water. Somewhere a mother called again, and then another. And at last, one by one, they got up and said goodnight to the grandmother, and went away along the boards toward the lamps of the city. They did not run, or shout, or make buzzing noises. They walked quietly, close together, and some of them were holding hands.

Mirri went last. At the very end of the wharf she stopped and turned back.

“Grandmother,” she called softly. “What did you give him? On the wharf, before he sailed? The harbor master saw you. He told Tadge, and Tadge told everyone. You gave him something wrapped in kelp.”

The grandmother looked at her a long while in the dark.

“A piece of tooth,” she said at last.

Mirri stared.

“The tip of the serpent woman’s fang,” said the grandmother. “The one that broke, on the first morning, when she fell. It flew off into the air and landed in a crack in the wharf beside a bent nail. The nail told it that nobody ever goes back, that it would lie there in the crack until it was dust. And I picked it up that evening, and wrapped it in kelp, and kept it in my pocket. I did not know why. I thought someone might want it.” Click. “Someone did.”

“What will he do with it?”

“Keep it,” said the grandmother. “Against his chest, inside his shirt, wherever he goes. And perhaps sometimes, on some cold morning in some far-off port, at Helios up, when he looks up at the mast and hopes, he will put his hand on it.” She was quiet a moment. “They say a fang knows the fang it came from. Perhaps a piece of tooth knows the tooth it broke from, too. Perhaps, if he holds it at the right moment, at Helios up, he will feel something. A little warmth. A little hum. A serpent woman a thousand miles away, spinning at the top of a mast, with her arms spread wide.” Click. “Or perhaps not. I do not know. I am only a grandmother.”

Mirri stood at the end of the wharf a long while. Then she said, “Goodnight, Grandmother,” very softly, and turned and went away into the lamplight.

And the grandmother sat alone on her worn piling at the end of the farthest wharf in Saltcoil, in the dark, with her staff across her knees and her shawl around her shoulders. The pilings creaked and the ropes sighed. Far out past the breakwater the reef broke white under the pale light of VaporSphere, and somewhere beyond it, far to the north, a small ketch was sailing on through the night with a young man at her rail.

“You did not tell them everything,” said the old horn-shell on its iron straps.

“No,” said the grandmother.

“You did not tell them that you do not know whether any of it will happen. Whether he will become a captain, or name a ship the Morning Truck, or look up at every mast. You do not know any of that.”

“No,” said the grandmother. “I do not know any of it.”

“Then why did you tell it?”

The grandmother looked out at the sea for a long while.

“Because it is true,” she said at last. “Not the ports and the ship and the years. Those are only the shape of it, the way the planks are the shape of a boat. But the rest is true. That something beautiful came at the wrong time, and went away, and that somebody will remember it. That is true now, tonight, already. That is always true.” She clicked her beak softly. “And the children needed to hear it, old shell. They are young. They think that love is a thing that either works or does not, like a lock. They do not know yet that the saddest and the sweetest thing in the whole world is the love that does not work, and is not wasted anyway.”

The old shell hummed in the wind and said nothing. It had been empty a long time, and it knew a great deal about things that are gone and are not wasted.

And the grandmother looked out at the sea and began, very softly, to count.

“Thirty,” she said. “The Salt Herring.” Click. “Thirty-one. The Bright Morrow, which is not here.” Click. “Thirty-two. The serpent woman, who arrived.” Click.

She paused, and looked north, toward the dark place on the horizon where the Frostwind had gone.

“Thirty-three,” she said. “The Frostwind. With a young man aboard, looking up.” Click.

“Still at sea.”

 

• Segment 22: Warmth Is Merely Friction

Being a Further Account by Tibbet Gearwhistle, Silversmith and Toothwright, of Ropewalk Lane, of a Report Concerning a Change of Temperature in a Tier-One Crystal, with a Full and Satisfactory Explanation of the Same, and No Mention of Magic Whatsoever

Of the Week of Dimming, and the Quality of the Light

I begin with the light, since the light is the first thing that any reasonable observer would have noticed in the week of Dimming, and since it bears upon what follows.

The week of Dimming is the sixth week of every month, and is named for the dimming of the light of Helios as the great banded world VaporSphere passes across its face. The passage occurs in the middle of each day of that week, beginning a little before noon and ending a little after. It grows longer and deeper each day as the week goes on, until on the last day, Illusday, the light at noon is no more than a thin gray glimmer. Then the week of Darkness begins, and VaporSphere covers Helios entirely for some hours at the middle of each day, and the cold comes down. Every child in Saltcoil knows this. It happens every month. I mention it here only because in the week of Dimming in the month of Tyrus, in the year 8612a, I took the opportunity to measure it.

I possess a device for measuring the strength of light, of my own design and manufacture. It consists of a small brass box, blackened inside, with a pinhole at one end and a strip of white card at the other. Behind the card is a set of graduated gray glass filters, which may be slid across the pinhole one after another. One looks through the eyepiece and slides the filters across until the spot of light on the card can just no longer be seen. The number of the last filter gives the strength of the light, in units of my own devising, which I call gearwhistles. A clear noon in the week of Warming measures one hundred and twelve gearwhistles. A clear noon in the week of Blooming, one hundred and four. A moonlit night by the light of VaporSphere at its full, a little under two.

On Conjursday, the first day of Dimming, at noon, the light measured eighty-one gearwhistles. On Evoday, sixty-three. On Abjursday, forty-one. By that day, the third of the week, the light at noon had become thin and gray and peculiar, like the light inside a shell, or like soup to which too much water has been added. I did not use that comparison myself. It was the serpent woman’s, and she used it in my hearing on the morning of Evoday, coming in from her climb. I record it because it is in fact a fairly exact description of the appearance of the light. It has the same quality as watered soup, of being recognizably the thing it is and yet not enough of it.

I record also that the air grew noticeably colder during the passage on each day. On Abjursday it fell nine degrees between eleven o’clock and noon by my thermometer, which hangs on the wall beside my workbench and which I had calibrated against the freezing and boiling of pure water in the year 8597a. I record this because it, too, bears upon what follows.

Of a Report by the Customer

At four minutes past noon on Abjursday, the third day of the week of Dimming, the thirty-eighth of the month of Tyrus, the serpent woman came into my shop.

She does not, as a rule, come into my shop at noon. She climbs at Helios up and comes down, and then goes about her affairs in the city: to the end of the farthest wharf to speak with the old shellback grandmother, or to Tanner’s Yard to tell stories to the children, or to the Blue Gull tavern, where the girl Nettie Brindle gives her stew. She returns to my back room only in the evening, to sleep in the warm corner behind my forge, under an arrangement intended solely to protect my floor. I had, at noon on Abjursday, my eye to the eyepiece of my light-measuring device, and was sliding the third gray filter across the pinhole, when the door opened. I heard the long soft sound of her coming in over the threshold.

“Tibbet,” she said.

“I am occupied,” I said. “I am measuring the light. It is at forty-one gearwhistles and falling. Kindly do not stand in the window.”

She did not stand in the window. She came across the shop and coiled herself down by the forge, close to it, as near as she could get without touching the iron. I took my eye from the eyepiece and looked at her.

I record what I observed.

She was cold. Serpent folk do not make their own warmth, as gnomes do. They take it from the world around them, from the sun and the stones, and when the world grows cold, so do they. The air that day had fallen nine degrees in the hour before noon, and she had been out in it. Her scales were dull. She moved slowly. She held her jaw in a peculiar way, a little open and a little to one side, as a person holds a hand that has been struck. And she was rubbing it, the hinge of the jaw beneath her right ear, with the heel of her hand, round and round.

“Your jaw,” I said.

“It aches,” she said. “It’s been aching since Conjursday. Since the light started going. The ropes are cold in the mornings now, so cold they burn. Not like Warming, when they burned with heat. They burn with cold. And the cold gets into my teeth, into your caps, and down into the jaw, and it aches all day.” She rubbed it. “It’s nothing. It’ll pass.”

“It is not nothing,” I said. “It is the contraction of the ligaments of the jaw in cold conditions, compounded by thirty-seven days of repeated loading. It is a known effect. You should rest it.”

“I can’t rest it,” she said. “Twelve days to go.”

I had nothing useful to say to this, so I said “Hmph,” and turned back to my light-measuring device.

“Tibbet,” she said. “That isn’t why I came.”

I turned back.

She was sitting very still by the forge, looking at me with her gold eyes in the thin gray light. She had stopped rubbing her jaw. She had put her tongue, instead, to the inside of her lip, on the left side, where the band of the left cap lies against the gum. She held it there a long moment. Then she took it away.

“The crystal,” she said. “It’s warm.”

I did not say anything for some seconds.

“It’s never been warm,” she said. “Not once. Not since you set it. It’s always been cool. Cool like the rest of the cap, like the enamel and the silver. Like rope first thing in the morning. I touch it with my tongue a hundred times a day, I can’t help it, it’s a habit. And it’s always cool. But this morning, at the top of the mast, at Helios up, when I was hanging, I touched it and it was warm. And it’s still warm. It’s been warm all morning.” She put her tongue to it again, and held it there, and took it away. “It’s warm now. Warmer. Like a stone that’s been in the sun. Only there isn’t any sun. The sun’s being eaten.”

She looked at me.

“Why is it warm, Tibbet?”

Of My Examination

I wish to record that I was not in any way disturbed by this report. A change of temperature in a small object is among the most ordinary occurrences in the world. Every object in the world changes its temperature continually, according to its surroundings, and the reason can always be found by a sufficiently careful examination. I proposed to make one. I asked her to rest her chin on the edge of my workbench and open her mouth. She did so.

I lowered the third lens of my goggles. The cap, the band, and the crystal were exactly as I had made them. The enamel was green and smooth, the scale pattern sharp, the silver tip needle-pointed, the band flat and true against the gum. The engraved serpent on the band looked across the gap at its fellow on the right band, head to head. The crystal sat in its bezel on the inner face of the band, small and round and dull and pale, the color of sea glass on the beach. It was not glowing. It looked precisely as it had looked on the morning I set it, on the last day of Lathandus, when it had done nothing at all and I had been relieved.

I took down from its hook on the wall my thermometer. It is a slender glass tube of alcohol, colored red with madder, with a scale engraved on brass behind it, graduated to the half degree. I wiped the bulb of it clean. I asked her to hold still, and I touched the bulb to the crystal, gently, and held it there, and watched the red line.

It rose.

It rose slowly, as such lines do, and came to rest. I read it. Then I moved the bulb to the enamel of the cap, a quarter of an inch away, and waited, and read it again. Then to the silver of the band beside the crystal. Then to the right cap, the crown. Then to the inside of her lower lip. Then I hung the thermometer back on its hook and read the air of the shop. I recorded all six readings in my notebook. I give them here.

The air of the shop, by the forge: sixty-one degrees.

The inside of the customer’s lower lip: fifty-nine degrees. This was two degrees below the air. That is as it should be in a cold-blooded creature that has lately come in from the cold and has not yet warmed to the room.

The enamel of the right cap: fifty-eight and a half degrees.

The enamel of the left cap, a quarter of an inch from the crystal: fifty-nine degrees.

The silver of the left band, beside the crystal: fifty-nine and a half degrees.

The crystal: sixty-eight degrees.

I read the last figure three times. I took the thermometer down again and touched it to the crystal again and waited and read it again. It was sixty-eight degrees. Nine degrees above the enamel a quarter of an inch away. Nine degrees above the inside of her lip, against which it lay. Seven degrees above the air of the shop, by the forge, at noon. Outside, in the thin gray light of the passing of VaporSphere, the air had fallen nine degrees in the hour before.

It was warm. It was warm in itself. Warmer than anything around it. Warmer than anything it touched.

I wish to record that I was not disturbed by this.

I sat back on my stool and raised the third lens of my goggles and looked at her, and she looked at me, and neither of us said anything for some time.

“Well?” she said at last.

“It is warm,” I said.

“I know it’s warm. I told you it was warm. Why is it warm?”

I folded my hands in my lap.

“There are a number of causes,” I said, “any one of which would be sufficient to explain it. I will take them in order.”

Of the Causes

I set them down here as I set them out for her, at length, by the forge, in the thin gray light, between four minutes past noon and twenty-three minutes to one. I believe the reader will find them, taken together, a full and satisfactory account of the matter.

The first cause is friction.

“You have told me,” I said, “that you touch the crystal with your tongue a hundred times a day. I believe that to be an underestimate. I have observed you. I observed you on the evening of Evoday, between Helios down and the time you went to sleep, and counted. You touched the crystal with your tongue four hundred and twelve times in two hours and eleven minutes. That is a little over three times a minute. If you do the same through every waking hour, you touch it something over four thousand times a day.”

“Do I?” she said, astonished.

“You do. It is a habit. Each time you touch it, the surface of your tongue moves across the surface of the crystal, under some small pressure. And when two surfaces move across each other under pressure, there is friction. And friction,” I said, “produces heat. That is a fundamental principle of mechanics. Rub your hands together and they grow warm. Rub two sticks together long enough and they will catch fire. Your tongue has rubbed against that crystal four thousand times a day for thirty-eight days. That is one hundred and fifty-two thousand rubbings. I have calculated that the heat produced by each rubbing, though very small, would be sufficient, if retained in the crystal, to raise its temperature over the period by a measurable amount. The crystal is warm,” I said, “because you have been licking it.”

She was silent a moment.

“But the enamel’s not warm,” she said. “Right next to it. And I touch the enamel too, all the time. I touch all of it. The whole inside of the cap.”

“The enamel,” I said, “is a very poor conductor of heat, and a very large body compared to the crystal. Heat produced in it by friction would be spread through a much greater mass and carried away quickly by the cooler air. Whereas the crystal is small and dense and set deep in a silver bezel, which holds it.”

“Silver carries heat,” she said. “Doesn’t it? You told me that, when you were casting the bands. You said silver carries heat better than anything.”

I was silent for a moment.

“The second cause,” I said, “is the forge.”

“The forge?”

“You sleep beside it. Every night, for thirty-eight nights, you have slept in the warm corner behind my forge, with your head on the stone floor not three feet from the firebox. The firebox, even when the fire is banked, gives off a steady heat all night. Your caps, being in your mouth, have been exposed to that heat for something over eight hours every night. The crystal is of a very dense material, as all crystals are. Dense materials store heat well and release it slowly, as a stone left in the sun stays warm long after sunset. The crystal has been soaking up the heat of my forge every night for thirty-eight nights. Now, as the weather grows cold in the week of Dimming, it is releasing that heat. It is warm,” I said, “because of my forge.”

She looked at the forge. She looked at me.

“I slept by the forge every night in Warming,” she said. “And in Illumination. And in Blooming and Buzzing and Passion. Thirty-seven nights. And the crystal was never warm. Not once. It only got warm this morning. At the top of the mast. In the cold.”

“Precisely,” I said. “It has been storing the heat for thirty-seven nights, and has only now begun to release it, because only now is the surrounding air cold enough to draw it out. That is the nature of stored heat.”

“But it’s warmer now than it was this morning,” she said. “I told you. It’s been getting warmer all morning. If it was letting out heat it had stored, wouldn’t it be getting cooler?”

I took off my goggles and polished the lenses on my apron. They did not need polishing.

“The third cause,” I said, “is fatigue.”

“I’m not tired,” she said. “Well. A little. But—”

“Not your fatigue. The silver’s. Metal fatigue.” I put my goggles back on. “When a piece of metal is loaded and unloaded repeatedly, bent and unbent, stretched and released, it undergoes a change in its internal structure. It is a matter of the arrangement of its smallest particles, which I will not trouble you with. One of the effects of that change is heat. Bend a piece of wire back and forth a few dozen times very quickly, and touch the bend, and you will find it warm. That is metal fatigue. Now: the silver band of your left cap, which holds the crystal in its bezel, has been loaded and unloaded thirty-eight times. Once every morning, when you hang your full weight of three hundred and ninety-six pounds and nine ounces from the halyard between your teeth, and once when you let go. And within each hanging it is loaded and unloaded continually, with every swing of the mast and every turn of the spin. I estimate perhaps two thousand cycles of loading in each hanging, and seventy-six thousand in all. The silver of the band is fatigued. It is producing heat. And the bezel, which is the part of the band most strained, being cut thinnest to hold the crystal, is producing the most heat, which it passes to the crystal it holds. The crystal is warm,” I said, “because the silver is tired.”

“But the right band’s not warm,” she said. “It holds the same weight. It’s loaded just the same. And it was fifty-eight and a half. You said so.”

“The right band has no bezel,” I said. “It is not cut thin anywhere. It is therefore not so strained.”

“And the silver beside the crystal,” she said, “on the left band, right next to the bezel. That was fifty-nine and a half. Not sixty-eight. If the bezel was making heat and giving it to the crystal, wouldn’t the silver next to it be warm too?”

I did not answer. I took out my notebook and turned back to the page where I had written the six readings and looked at them. Fifty-nine and a half. Sixty-eight.

“The fourth cause,” I said, rather loudly, “is the eclipse.”

“The eclipse?”

“The passing of VaporSphere across the face of Helios. The week of Dimming. The light,” I said, gesturing at the window, through which the thin gray watered-soup light of noon was coming in at forty-one gearwhistles and falling, “the light is very much less than usual. And the cold is very much more. Nine degrees in an hour before noon today, by my thermometer. In such conditions every object in the world is colder than it is accustomed to being. Your lip. Your enamel. The silver. The air. But the crystal is a dense body, very small, very well insulated in its bezel, and it does not cool as quickly as the things around it. It therefore seems warm by comparison. Your tongue, which is cold, touches it, and it is less cold than your tongue, and you perceive it as warm. It is not truly warm,” I said, “it is merely less cold. It is a matter of contrast.”

“But your thermometer said sixty-eight,” she said. “That’s warmer than the shop. Not less cold than my tongue. Warmer than the air by the forge.”

I looked at the thermometer on its hook on the wall. I looked at the forge. I looked at the window and the thin gray light.

“Fifth,” I said. “The venom.”

She folded her arms. She looked, in that moment, so exactly like the harbor master that I was obliged to look away.

“The enamel of your caps,” I said, “was soaked for one full day of twenty-two hours in a bath of reef venom, before the silver was fitted. As I recorded at the time, the enamel absorbed the whole of the venom, three fluid ounces, which is a quite exceptional quantity. It is very likely that some portion of that venom remains in the enamel, bound into its surface layer. The enamel was afterward sealed with a lacquer of silver dust and mangrove sap. It is a known property of certain venoms and certain saps that, brought together over a long period, they react slowly with one another, chemically. Some such reactions produce heat. It is entirely possible that the residual venom in the enamel has been reacting slowly with the mangrove sap in the lacquer for thirty-eight days, and producing heat, and that the heat has collected in the crystal, which is the densest part of the cap. The crystal is warm,” I said, “because of a chemical reaction between venom and sap.”

“Is it?” she said.

“It is possible.”

“You said, when you were making them, that the venom just altered the porosity. You said it didn’t do anything else. You said enamel doesn’t remember.”

“I said enamel does not remember,” I said. “I did not say venom does not react.”

“And the crystal’s not lacquered,” she said. “You left the bezel open. You said so. You set the crystal last, after the lacquer, and you didn’t lacquer it. I watched you.”

I said nothing. There was a silence in the shop. Outside, the light was going grayer, thirty-something gearwhistles now, I estimated, without looking. The air was growing colder. The forge ticked.

“Sixth,” I said. My voice was not quite as steady as I should have wished. “The city in the clouds.”

She looked at me for a long moment. And then she did a thing I had not expected. She began to laugh.

It was not her usual laugh, the loud rattling one like a cart going over a bridge. It was quieter than that, and softer, and went on longer. She sat there by my forge in the thin gray light with her arms folded and her gold eyes on me, laughing quietly, with her shoulders shaking. And I found that I did not know what to do. I am not accustomed to being laughed at. It is not a thing that happens to a gnome of science.

“Oh, Tibbet,” she said, when she could speak. “Oh, Tibbet. The city in the clouds.”

“It is a hypothesis,” I said stiffly. “I have advanced it before. The floating spells of the mages, cast every day upon the bowls, constitute a disturbance of the ordinary operation of weight on a very great scale, which may leak, and spread, and lie over the sea like a mist. And a disturbance of weight may very well be accompanied by a disturbance of heat. The two are related. It is entirely possible—”

“Tibbet,” she said.

I stopped.

She was not laughing now. She had unfolded her arms and was leaning toward me, by the forge, with her gold eyes very steady on mine.

“Is it magic?” she said.

Of Her Question, and My Answer

I wish to record my answer exactly, since I am aware that it has been reported otherwise.

I took off my goggles. I set them on the workbench. I folded my hands in my lap and looked at her, and I spoke slowly and clearly, as I had spoken to her in the doorway on the day she first came into my shop, dripping, so that there could be no possible misunderstanding.

“Madam,” I said. “There is no such thing.”

She did not say anything.

“There is no such thing as magic,” I said, “in the sense in which you mean it. There are the floating spells of the mages, which are a crude and wasteful manipulation of the natural operation of weight, and which I do not hold with. There are the little tricks of the World Bank’s toasters and clocks, which are, I am satisfied, merely very well made machines. There is the Mind’s Eye, which is a natural faculty, like sight, and nothing more mysterious. There are a great many things which ignorant persons call magic because they do not understand the mechanism by which they occur. But there is no magic in my work. I put none in it. I told you so at the beginning. I put in honest silver, and honest enamel, and an honest crystal, and honest work. Honest things do not become magic of their own accord, any more than a hammer becomes a bird. A crystal is a battery. It is a thing of storing, like a jar. It holds what is put into it. I put nothing into it. Therefore it holds nothing. Therefore it is not magic. Therefore its warmth has a natural cause, which I will find, as I have found the natural cause of every other thing that has ever happened in this shop. And that,” I said, “is the whole of it.”

She looked at me a long time.

“Then what is the natural cause?” she said. “Which of the six?”

I did not answer at once.

“It is very likely,” I said at last, “a combination of all of them.”

She looked at me a while longer. Then she put her tongue to the inside of her lip again, on the left side, and held it there, and closed her eyes.

“It’s like a heartbeat,” she said quietly. “Did you know? It isn’t steady. It comes and goes. A little warmer, and then a little less, and then a little warmer again. Slowly. Like something breathing.” She opened her eyes. “Friction doesn’t breathe, Tibbet. Does it?”

I did not say anything.

She uncoiled herself from beside the forge, slowly, for she was still cold, and went to the door. On the threshold she stopped and turned back.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m not frightened of it. I thought I might be, at the top of the mast, this morning, when I first felt it. But I wasn’t. It feels…” She searched for the word. “It feels like being held. Like somebody holding my hand, very gently, in the dark.” She smiled at me, with both her green caps bare. “Whatever it is. Friction or forge or venom or the city in the clouds. Thank you for it.”

“I did nothing,” I said. “I put nothing in it.”

“I know,” she said. “Thank you anyway.”

And she went out, into the thin gray watered-soup light of Ropewalk Lane at noon in the week of Dimming, and was gone.

Of the Evening

I record the rest of that day briefly.

I returned to my light-measuring device. At a quarter past twelve the light measured twenty-nine gearwhistles, its lowest of the day; at one o’clock, forty-four; at two, seventy-one. VaporSphere passed off the face of Helios and the light came back, though thin still, as it always is in the week of Dimming. The air warmed by six degrees. I recorded all of this.

At three o’clock I went up to my roof and resumed my inquiry into the hanging. I continued it through the afternoon with no better success than in the preceding weeks. The figures did not sum. They have not summed since the week of Warming. I will not repeat them here.

At Helios down I came down from the roof, and lit the lamp, and banked the forge, and looked at my barometer.

I record this in passing. I possess a barometer of my own manufacture, made in the year 8590a. It is a column of quicksilver in a glass tube, with a scale behind it, graduated to the hundredth of an inch. It has been more accurate in its predictions, over twenty-two years, than any almanac or any fisherman’s knee in Saltcoil. On the morning of Conjursday, the first of Dimming, it stood at twenty-nine inches and eighty-four hundredths, which is fair. On the evening of Abjursday it stood at twenty-nine and forty-one, a fall of forty-three hundredths in three days. It was still falling. I have seen it fall so far, so fast, only three times in twenty-two years. On each of those occasions there followed, within the week, a storm of the first rank, from the east.

I attribute nothing to this. It is the eclipse. The passage of VaporSphere causes small disturbances in the air. I record it only because it is a measurement, and I record all my measurements. I note also that the week after Dimming is the week of Darkness. In the week of Darkness the eclipse is total for some hours at the middle of each day, and the cold is severe. A storm from the east in the week of Darkness would be a very bad storm indeed. And the serpent woman has, as of this evening, eleven days left to climb.

I attribute nothing to this either.

The serpent woman came in at a little after Helios down and went to her corner behind the forge and coiled herself down. Above her head, from a nail in the beam over the forge, hangs a bunch of purple heather. It was picked from the hills on the first day of the week of Passion by a young sailor now at sea, and has dried there upside down to a dusty gray. I have offered three times to throw it out, and three times been told not to. She looked up at it for a while. Then she touched her tongue to the inside of her lip and closed her eyes and went to sleep.

I sat at my bench.

I sat there a long while. The lamp burned. The forge ticked. The barometer on the wall stood at twenty-nine and thirty-nine. Behind the forge the serpent woman breathed slowly in her sleep, and every so often, I observed, her mouth moved a little, as if her tongue were touching something.

Then I did a thing I had not intended to do.

I got down off my stool and went round to the back of my workbench, to the narrow gap between the top of it and the wall behind, where I keep things I do not wish to lose and do not wish to look at. I put my hand into it and felt about among the papers there until I found what I was looking for, and drew it out.

I record what it was.

It was not one sheet, as when I first put it there on the last day of the week of Warming. It was nine. I had not, until that moment, counted them.

The first was the page from my notebook, page forty-one, with the drawing in the right-hand margin, three inches and five-eighths across, of the two caps and the halyard between them and the two engraved serpents facing each other. The others had come after. I record that I had made them in the evenings, at my bench, after the serpent woman was asleep. They were in the margins of other calculations, for the purpose of illustrating the distribution of load, and the contraction of the ligaments of the jaw, and the angle of the halyard at the truck. Each of them, when the calculation was done, had been found to be of no further use, and had been torn out and put into the gap. I had not looked at any of them again. I looked at them now.

There was the left cap in section, showing the crystal in its bezel and the band and the scale pattern of the enamel, eight inches across, very exact. There was the right cap, the crown, seated on the filed stump, with the stump drawn in dotted line within it. There were the two serpents of the bands, drawn large, each one biting its tail. There was a drawing of the whole mouth, closed on the halyard, from the front. There was a drawing of her at the top of the mast, from my roof, as she appears through the brass tube: a small figure with arms spread and the long body hanging straight down, eleven hundred and four feet away. I do not know why I made that one. It illustrates nothing. There was a drawing of the purple heather on its nail. There was a drawing, very small, at the corner of one sheet, of a fly.

And the last, made on the night of Divinday in the week of Passion, which I did not remember making at all. It was the crystal alone, life size, the size of a coin, in its bezel, round and pale and dull. Beside it, in my own hand, very small, were the words: eighty-four grains. Does nothing.

I laid all nine on my bench under the lamp, side by side, and looked at them for some time.

Then I took up my finest pen, the one I use for engraving guides, which makes a line no thicker than a hair from a gull’s breast. I dipped it, and in the margin beside the last drawing, beneath eighty-four grains, does nothing, I wrote:

Warm. 3.6.3. 68 degrees at noon, in the eclipse. 9 above the enamel. Comes and goes, she says. Like breathing.

I looked at it.

Then, beneath it, smaller still, so small that I had to lower the third lens of my goggles to see it as I wrote, I added:

I do not know why.

I record that I have never in my life written those words before. Not in any notebook, nor any daybook, nor any workshop record, nor any letter. I have written that a cause was not yet determined. I have written that further measurement was required. I have written that a discrepancy was attributed to an error in the instruments, or the wind, or the gulls, or the city in the clouds. I have never written that I did not know why.

I sat looking at it.

Then I took up the pen again, to strike it out. I had the nib on the paper. And I did not strike it out. I do not know why I did not. I put the pen down.

I gathered the nine sheets together, in order, and squared their edges against the bench, and put them back into the gap between the top of my workbench and the wall, where I keep things I do not wish to lose and do not wish to look at. I put them a little nearer the front of the gap than before, where they would be easier to reach.

Then I put out the lamp and sat a while in the dark.

Behind the forge the serpent woman slept. Her mouth moved a little now and then. On the wall the quicksilver of my barometer, invisible in the dark, was falling. Out beyond the breakwater, beyond the reef, the sea was moving in the dark with a long, slow, heavy swell from the east, which I could hear, faintly, if I listened. I had not heard it before that night.

Warmth is merely friction. I wish that understood. Warmth is merely friction, or the forge, or fatigue, or the eclipse, or venom and sap, or the city in the clouds, or all of them together, in some proportion I have not yet been able to determine. It is not anything else. There is nothing else for it to be.

I do not know why.

I went up to bed. I did not sleep for a long time. And when I did, I dreamed that I was standing on my roof at Helios up with my eye to the brass tube. In the circle of the lens, eleven hundred and four feet away, at the truck of the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt, something small and round and pale was shining like a coal.

• Segment 23: Gray Cloth and Shell Light

Of Eclipses Seen from Below

Of all the things that happen in the sky, there is one that the creatures of the deep know better than the dry ones do. It is the eclipse.

This will seem strange to the reader, who will say: how can a creature that has never seen the sky know anything of what happens in it? And it is a fair question. We have never seen the sky. We have never seen Helios, except as a brightness on the silver ceiling of the sea, nor VaporSphere at all. When the great banded world passes before the face of the star in the weeks of Dimming and Darkness each month, we do not see it pass. We have never once in eight lives looked up and seen the round dark edge of the one creeping across the bright face of the other, as the dry ones do from their wharves and roofs and the tops of their masts.

But we feel it. And we have felt it longer than any dry one has lived, and more often, and more deeply. In the end it is feeling, and not seeing, that teaches a creature what a thing truly is.

Consider the silver ceiling. On an ordinary day it is the brightest thing in our world. It is a great white shimmer far above, too bright to look at for long, from which the light comes down through the water in long wavering bars. Even at our rock, in the deep, where the light gives up, we can see it: a faint gray glimmer, like a window in a house seen from the bottom of a well. It is our sun and our sky and our horizon all in one, and we have watched it every day of every life.

In the week of Dimming, it fades.

Not all at once. A little each day, beginning a little before noon and ending a little after, and a little more each day than the day before. The silver ceiling goes from white to gray, and the long bars of light coming down through the water grow thin and pale. The colors of the middle water, the blues and the cool greens, go dull. At the reef top, where the coral grows, the small bright fish stop darting. They hang still in the water, puzzled, as if they had forgotten what they were doing. Some of them go into their holes in the coral, as they do at night. It is not night. They do not know that. They know only that the light has gone strange.

And the cold comes down. That is the thing the dry ones do not know, or do not think of. When the light of Helios is taken from the sea, the warmth goes with it. Not all of it, for the sea holds warmth long, as a stone does. But the top of the sea, the first few fathoms beneath the silver ceiling, grows cool in the week of Dimming. In the week of Darkness, when the eclipse is total and the silver ceiling goes black for hours at the middle of the day, it grows cold. Then the cold sinks, slowly, as cold does, down through the green and the gray and the blue, ledge by ledge and stair by stair, until it reaches even us on our black rock in the deep. And we feel it on our scales and in our blood, and we grow slow.

We have felt this four hundred times in this life alone, once each month, for the thirty-odd years since we swam home to our rock as a small thing and began, once more, to grow. And in our other lives, all eight of them, how many times? Thousands. We do not count them. One does not count raindrops.

Mostly it is only strange, and cold, and then it passes. In the week of Illumination the light comes back and the warmth with it. The fish come out of their holes, and the coral at the reef top blooms again, and we uncoil a little from our rock and forget, until next month, that the light was ever gone.

But not always.

Of the Fifth Death, Again

We have told already of the fifth death. We do not like to tell it, and we will tell it only briefly now, because it bears upon what follows.

In the fifth life on this rock, the eclipse came in a hard year. It was a cold year, colder than any we had known. The week of Darkness that month was colder still, and longer, as if the great banded world had stopped before the face of Helios and would not go on. The cold came down through the water to our rock and kept coming, deeper and harder than it had ever come. We slowed, and slowed, until we could barely move. We lay coiled around our rock in the black, with the silver ceiling gone dark far above and the water around us cold as the inside of a stone.

And something came up out of the deep trench beyond the reef.

It lives there still, we think. Or another like it lives there. We do not know its name; the creatures of the deep do not give it one. It is older than we are and larger than we are. It does not come up into the shallower water in the warm weeks. It cannot bear the light. But in the weeks of Darkness, when the light is gone from the sea, it sometimes rises. And in the hard year of our fifth life, when the cold had made us slow, it rose all the way to our rock. It ate us slowly, in the dark, and we were too cold to fight.

That is why the week of Darkness frightens us. Not only for the cold. Not only for the dark. For what the dark lets rise.

And it is why, in the week of Dimming in the month of Tyrus, in the year 8612a, lying coiled around our black rock with two weeks of tellings strung in our memory like the grandmother’s beads, we were afraid.

Of the Tellings of Dimming

She told us the sky was changing.

On the first morning of Dimming, the thirty-sixth of Tyrus, at Helios up, the hum came down through the old sheaths and her voice in it. It was not the voice of the week of Blooming, bright and eager, full of purple. It was quieter. It was the voice of someone looking at something they do not quite understand.

“The great one is very close to Helios this morning,” she said. “VaporSphere. The banded one. I’ve watched it every morning from the top of the mast, coming up in the east beside Helios, and it’s been coming closer every day. This morning it’s so close they’re nearly touching. Helios is coming up out of the sea, gold, like it always does, and VaporSphere is right beside it, huge, cream and rust, much bigger than Helios. It looks…” She was quiet a moment, hanging. “It looks like a great animal creeping up on a small one. Very slowly. Like a cat on a sparrow.”

We said nothing. We knew what came next. We have felt it four hundred times in this life alone.

On the second morning, the thirty-seventh, she said: “The sky has become a gray cloth.”

Her voice was flat in the hum. Not sad. Only flat, the way the light was flat.

“It’s not cloudy,” she said. “There aren’t any clouds. But the whole sky has gone gray, like a cloth stretched over it. Like the canvas of a tent seen from inside on an overcast day. The blue’s gone out of it. Helios is still there, but it’s gray too, almost, and small, and the great one is right up against it now. Their edges are touching. I can see the place where they touch.” She was quiet. “The gulls are quiet this morning. They’re all sitting on the bollards. None of them are flying.”

On the third morning, the thirty-eighth, she said: “The light is like the light inside a shell.”

And on that morning, something happened in the sheaths that had not happened before.

They grew warm.

We felt it first in the pearls at the roots of our living fangs. The pearls are the place where the voice comes in, where the hum of her speaking passes from the old shed sheaths into us. They had always been cool. They are pearls, and pearls are cool, as the sea is cool. But on the morning of the thirty-eighth, as her voice came down through them, they grew warm. Not hot. Not the heat of the week of Warming, when the rope burned her mouth and we felt the burning in our own fangs. A different warmth. Gentle. Steady. Like the warmth of our black rock against our scales, which we have felt every day of every life and which we have learned, from her, is red.

It came and went. It grew a little warmer, and then a little less, and then a little warmer again. Slowly. Like breathing.

And she said, at the top of the spin, in the stillness, with her mouth closed on the rope:

“The crystal’s warm.”

We did not answer.

“The crystal in the left cap,” she said. “The one the gnome set. It’s always been cool, every morning, since the first day. And this morning it’s warm. I touched it with my tongue at the top of the mast, just now, and it’s warm. Like a stone in the sun. Only there isn’t any sun, hardly. The sun’s going gray.”

She was quiet a moment, hanging.

“Is it you?” she said. “Are you doing it? Are you warming it? From down there?”

And we did not know.

We wish to be honest, as we have tried to be honest throughout. We did not know. We lay coiled around our black rock with the pearls at the roots of our fangs gone warm and breathing, and we searched the long dark length of ourselves for any sign that we were doing it. Any reaching, any pushing, any giving of ourselves up through the sheaths into her. We found none. We were not doing anything. We were only lying there, listening, as we had listened for thirty-eight mornings. And yet the warmth was in the pearls, and in the sheaths, and in her crystal, all at once, all together, breathing.

“We do not know,” we said. “We are not doing it. Not that we know of. But we feel it too. Here. In our own teeth. It is warm here too.”

She was silent a long time at the top of the mast.

“Then it’s both of us,” she said at last, very softly. “Isn’t it. Whatever it is.”

“Perhaps,” we said.

“The gnome says it’s friction,” she said. “And the forge. And metal fatigue, and the eclipse, and venom and sap reacting, and the city in the clouds.” The hum shook; she was laughing, a little. “He gave me six reasons. He was so cross. He said it couldn’t be magic because there’s no such thing.”

“Perhaps there is not,” we said. “We do not know what magic is. We have lived eight lives and we do not know. We know only that it is warm.”

“It feels like being held,” she said. “Like somebody holding my hand, very gently, in the dark.”

And our pearls grew warmer at that, and we did not know why.

Of Holding

Let us consider holding.

The dry ones think of holding as a thing done with hands. One holds a cup, a rope, a child, another’s hand in the dark. It is a grasping, a closing of the fingers around a thing so that it does not fall or go away. We have no hands, and so we did not think, for most of our lives, that we could hold anything. We could coil around a rock. We could take a thing in our mouth, gently, as a mother serpent takes her young. But we did not call that holding. We called it only coiling, and carrying.

And yet what is coiling, if not holding? We have held our black rock for eight lives. We have wound ourselves round it, turn upon turn, and held it so tightly that the eels say we have worn grooves in the stone. We have held it through cold and storm and war and the long years of waiting. It has held us back. It is the only thing in all the sea that has never let us go.

And she, at the top of the mast, holds a rope by her teeth. That is holding too. It is holding with the jaw, with the whole long body hanging from it, with nothing else to grip but the rope between her teeth. It is the hardest holding there is. The gnome in Ropewalk Lane says it is impossible, the chain tells us. He has figures. He sits on his roof with brass instruments and does sums, and the sums say that her jaw should open and the rope should part and she should fall. She holds anyway. Every morning. Thirty-eight mornings.

And now, it seemed, something was holding her. Something warm, in the crystal, in the sheaths, in the pearls, coming and going like a breath. Holding her very gently, like a hand in the dark. And it was holding us too, at the same time, in the same way, a thousand fathoms of water and a hundred and forty feet of air apart. We did not know what it was. We knew only that we were both held by it, and both holding, and that it was warm.

We had not felt held by anything but our rock in eight lives.

We coiled ourselves tighter around it that night. We did not know why.

Of the Great One Eating

On the fourth morning of Dimming, the thirty-ninth of Tyrus, she said: “Helios is being eaten.”

Her voice in the hum was very quiet.

“Slowly,” she said. “By the great one. VaporSphere. It came up this morning out of the sea right on top of Helios, overlapping it, and there’s a bite out of Helios now. A round dark bite, on the side where the great one is. Like someone’s taken a bite out of a gold coin. And the bite’s getting bigger, while I watch. Slowly. It’s eating Helios.” She was silent a while. “I know it isn’t really. I know it happens every month. Everyone says so. The fishwives say it’s nothing, and the gnome says it’s astronomy, and the grandmother just clicks her beak. But from up here, at the top of the mast, with the light going gray and the cold coming down and the gulls not flying, it looks like being eaten. It looks like something enormous swallowing something small, slowly, while it can’t get away.”

Something enormous swallowing something small, slowly, while it cannot get away.

We lay on our black rock in the deep and could not move.

For we knew that. We knew it from the inside. We had been the small thing, in the fifth life, in the cold and the dark of the week of Darkness, with the enormous mouth closing round us and our blood too slow to fight. And we had been the enormous thing too, in our first lives, in our lives of killing. We had risen beneath the little fishing boats and broken them. We had closed our mouth on the dry ones who came down after their nets with knives in their teeth. We knew both. We knew what it is to be eaten and what it is to eat. And she, at the top of the mast, a hundred and forty feet above the sea, looking at the sky, had seen in it the very thing that we know best and fear most. And she had told it to us without knowing.

“Are you there?” she said, after a while. “You’ve gone quiet.”

“We are here,” we said.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“No,” we said. “You said something true. That is different. But it is not always easier.”

She was silent a long time at the top of the mast. The warmth in the sheaths breathed, slowly, in and out.

“It comes back,” she said at last, gently, as one says a thing to a child afraid of the dark. “Helios. After. Everyone says so. After the week of Darkness, the great one goes on, and lets go, and Helios comes back. It always comes back.”

“It always comes back,” we said. “Yes.”

We did not tell her that not everything does.

Of the Swell

On the fifth night of Dimming, the night between Transmuday and Divinday, we felt the swell.

It came from the east. It came as a long slow heave in the water, so long and so slow that a dry one in a boat on the surface would hardly have noticed it. The sea seemed to rise, very gently, over a long time, and then fall again over a long time, and then rise. But at our rock in the deep we felt it as a pressure, a weight, as if the whole sea above us had taken a long breath and was holding it. And we knew it.

There is a storm coming.

Not near. Not yet. Very far away to the east, a thousand miles, perhaps, beyond the edge of the world as the dry ones know it. But coming. The long swell runs ahead of a great storm as a herald runs ahead of a king. It goes out across the whole ocean, outward in every direction, faster than the storm itself, to tell the sea that something enormous is on its way. We have felt it many times. We know it as a fisherman knows the ache in his knee before rain. It means: in some days, in some few days, the wind will come, and the waves, and the rain sideways, and the masts will crack.

From the east. The direction the water flows from. Which the dry ones of Saltcoil say is a bad omen.

We do not believe in omens. We are too old for omens. But we lay coiled around our black rock in the dark and felt the long slow breath of the sea held over us, and we counted.

It was the night after the thirty-ninth day of the bargain. Ten days remained. The week of Dimming had three days left. Then came the week of Darkness, with the eclipse total for hours at the middle of each day and the cold coming down hard. And a storm from the east, coming, in some few days, to meet it.

The week of Darkness, and a storm, at the same time. The cold that had slowed us in the fifth life until we could not fight. The dark that lets the thing in the trench rise. The wind that had taken the diver in the fourth life off the eastern point, far from our reef, before he could climb his hill and tell us of the sky. And a serpent woman with an aching jaw and a warm crystal, hanging by her teeth at the top of the tallest mast in the harbor every morning at Helios up, with ten days to go.

We had hoped three times before. The diver, the gull-woman, the mage. Three times we had let ourselves hope that someone would show us the sky, and three times the hope had gone. And each time it had gone, we now saw, lying there in the dark with the swell held over us, in the same way: something came between. A storm. A distance. A forgetting. Something came between the hope and its end, and the hope did not reach the end.

We were afraid that it would happen again.

We were not afraid, now, of being disappointed. That fear, the old fear, the fear that had made us build a wall in the eighth life to keep hope out, had gone. It had cracked and fallen on the evening the grandmother’s fish came down through the dark. It had not come back. We found, lying there, that we did not care whether we were disappointed. If the bargain broke, if she fell on the forty-third day or the forty-eighth, if we never heard the end of it, we would still have had thirty-nine mornings. We would still have had the green bowl with white edges, and Helios shaking itself like a wet dog, and the purple sea on the hills that is the color of the scent of Blooming. We would still have known what red is. Nothing could take that from us now. We had it, and we would keep it, as the grandmother keeps her beads, for the rest of this life and into the next.

No. What we were afraid of was not losing the sky.

It was losing her.

Of an Offer

On the sixth morning of Dimming, the fortieth of Tyrus, Divinday, we did a thing we had not planned to do.

She came up the mast at Helios up. We felt her come; we always feel her come now, a faint quickening in the sheaths as she climbs, like a pulse. We felt her take the halyard between our old fangs, and let go, and hang. Her jaw ached; we felt that too, a deep dull ache that came down through the sheaths into our own jaw, as the burning had come in the week of Warming. The rope was cold, so cold it burned. She spun. At the top she stopped and spread her arms, and the warmth in the sheaths breathed, and she began to speak.

“The sea’s different this morning,” she said. “There are long lines on it. Long smooth lines, coming in from the east, one after another, very slow. Not waves exactly. Swells. Like the sea is breathing. The fishing boats are rising and falling on them at the farthest wharf, all together, slowly. And the grandmother…” She paused. “The grandmother’s on her piling at the end of the wharf. She’s not looking at me. She always looks at me, every morning. This morning she’s looking east. At the swells. She’s sitting very still and looking east.”

We did not let her finish.

“Velisse,” we said.

We had not used her name before. Not once, in forty mornings. We had called her serpent woman, at the edge of the deep. Since then we had called her nothing at all, only answered her, and listened. It came out of us now without our choosing, the way the decision to rise had come, and the price, and the green sheaths from the season of Blooming. We felt her start on the rope.

“Velisse,” we said. “Listen to us. A storm is coming.”

She was very still.

“From the east,” we said. “We feel it in the water. The swell you see is its herald. It is far off yet, but it is coming, and it is great. It will come, we think, in the week of Darkness, in some few days. In the dark and the cold, with the eclipse total and the light gone from the sky for hours at the middle of each day. It will be the worst storm you have seen in this life. Perhaps the worst we have felt in this one. The masts will bend. Perhaps they will crack.”

She did not say anything. The warmth in the sheaths breathed.

“You have given us forty days,” we said. “Forty dances. Forty tellings. You have given us the green bowl and the seeds in the soup and the little fish with their mouths open. You have given us Helios like a wet dog, and the gulls glowing white at the edges of their wings, and the reef seen from above, so that we know now where we are. You have given us yellow and red and purple. You have given us more than we have been given in eight lives.” We stopped. Our great deep voice, in the pearls, was not steady. “It is enough.”

“What do you mean?” she said. Her voice was very small.

“We mean,” we said, “that you may stop.”

Silence at the top of the mast.

“We release you,” we said. “From the bargain. You do not need to climb in the week of Darkness. You do not need to climb in the storm. Keep the shoes. They are yours. Keep them, and come down, and do not go up again until the storm has passed. We will not count it broken. We will count it finished. Forty days is enough. It is more than enough. We do not want…” And here we found that we could not say the rest. We have lived eight lives and been killed seven times and eaten once, slowly, in the dark, and we could not say it.

We do not want you to fall.

She hung there at the top of the mast a long time. The swell came in from the east beneath her, long and slow, and the boats at the farthest wharf rose and fell. On the last piling an old shellback sat very still and looked east. And the warmth in the sheaths breathed, in and out, between us.

“No,” she said.

We did not answer.

“No,” she said again. Her voice was quiet, but there was something in it we had not heard before. Something like rope under strain, like a mast in a gale. It does not bend. “No. I won’t stop.”

“Velisse—”

“You said forty-nine,” she said. “At the edge of the deep. You said one full month of the moon, all seven weeks and all seven days of each week. Forty-nine dances, every one without falling. You said that was the price. And I said yes.” She was silent a moment. “You said you wanted the bargain weighed in the month of justice, so it would be fair. You said a true price rings, like a bell. Forty-nine rings. Forty doesn’t.”

“We do not care if it rings,” we said. “We care—”

“I care,” she said.

We were silent.

“I care,” she said again, more gently. “Not for the bargain. Not for the shoes. For you. You’ve waited eight lives to see the sky. Eight lives. And you were going to let me stop at forty, nine days short, because you’re afraid I’ll fall.” The hum shook, a little; she was laughing, or crying, or both. “I won’t fall. I’ve got your teeth. And the gnome’s silver. And the crystal, which is warm, and nobody knows why. And I’ve got something else, too, that I didn’t have when I fell the first time.” She paused. “A fly taught it to me. The grandmother says so. You don’t always get to see it coming. And you have to hold on anyway.”

We lay on our black rock in the deep and could not speak.

“I’m not going to stop,” she said. “Not for a storm. Not for the dark. Not for anything. I stopped once, in the other life. I came down off the rope when my teeth went, and I never went up again, and I lived for years in a little room over a bakery, smelling sugar, and I died there wishing I’d gone up once more. Only once more. I’m not going to do that again.” Her voice steadied. “Forty-nine. I’ll give you forty-nine. And on the forty-ninth, at the top, in whatever weather, I’ll tell you what I see. And then it’ll be finished. Properly. And it’ll ring.”

The swell came in. The boats rose and fell.

“Is that all right?” she said. “Will you let me?”

And we found that what we felt, lying there coiled around our rock in the dark, with the pearls at the roots of our fangs gone warm and breathing, was two things at once. They were wound together so tightly that we could not tell where one ended and the other began, like the two strands of the rope she hangs from.

One of them was joy. A fierce, bright, terrible joy, like fire in water, which should not be possible. That she would not stop. That she cared for the bargain as we did, and for the ringing of it, and for us. That she would give us the forty-nine, every one, the whole price, true, in the month of justice, whatever came.

And the other was fear. A fear so great that it made the joy shake.

“We will let you,” we said at last. Our voice in the pearls was hardly a voice at all. “We cannot stop you. We would not if we could. But Velisse.”

“Yes?”

“Hold on.”

She laughed then, properly, the loud rattling laugh like a cart going over a bridge. It came down through the sheaths into the pearls and into the long dark length of us, and the small fish in our folds stirred and went still again.

“Always,” she said. “Always. That’s the whole act. That’s all it’s ever been.”

And she came down.

Of the Last Days of Dimming

On the seventh morning of Dimming, the forty-first of Tyrus, Enchanday, she told us the swells were bigger. Long gray hills of water, rolling in from the east one after another, so that the fishing boats at the farthest wharf were lifting and falling a man’s height on their lines. The fishermen had not gone out. The gulls had all flown inland, she said, in great white flocks, over the roofs of the city toward the hills. Not one was left on the wharves. The harbor master was on his step, she said, with his arms folded, looking east. The gnome was not behind his crates. He was on his roof, with something she could not see. And the grandmother had not moved from her piling since the evening before.

On the last morning of Dimming, the forty-second of Tyrus, Illusday, she said only:

“Tomorrow the dark comes.”

We said nothing.

“Forty-two,” she said. “Seven to go.”

“Seven to go,” we said.

And she came down, and the hum in the sheaths stopped, and the warmth in them went on, breathing, in and out, all that day and all the next night. It did not stop.

Of Listening

We are coiled around our black rock in the deep below Saltcoil. It was once fire, and it is red, though we cannot see it.

We are coiled tighter than we have ever been coiled. Tighter than in any of our eight lives. Turn upon turn upon turn, the whole ninety feet of us, wound round the black stone so hard that we can feel the grooves we have worn in it pressing into our scales. The coral crown on our head is pressed flat against the top of the rock. The bell on our tail, lashed there with braided kelp, is silent, for we are holding it still with the last coil of our body so that it will not ring and we will not miss anything. The small fish who nest in our folds have all gone into the deepest of them and do not come out.

The swell is over us. Long and slow and heavy, from the east, the sea holding its breath. It is stronger tonight than last night. It will be stronger tomorrow than tonight. Somewhere far to the east, beyond the edge of the world, something enormous is coming.

And the cold is coming down. Tomorrow is the first day of the week of Darkness. At noon VaporSphere will cover the whole face of Helios, and the silver ceiling far above us will go black. The cold will sink down through the water, ledge by ledge and stair by stair, until it reaches us. And in the trench beyond the reef, in the deep dark where the light has never come, something older and larger than we are may stir, and wonder whether this is a hard year.

We do not think it is a hard year. We think it is a good year. The best year of all eight lives. But we have been wrong before.

So we listen.

We listen as we have never listened, not even on the night before she came to the edge of the deep. We listen with every scale of us, every fold, every inch of the long dark length that we have worn around this rock for eight lives. We listen for the swell and for the cold and for the stirring in the trench. Above all, beneath all, we listen for the warmth in the pearls at the roots of our living fangs, breathing in and out, slowly. And through it, very faint, a long way off, up through a thousand fathoms of water and a hundred and forty feet of air, a serpent woman asleep in the warm corner behind a gnome’s forge with her tongue against a crystal.

She said it feels like being held.

It does. It feels like being held. It is the first time in eight lives that we have been held by anything but our rock. And now that we have it, now that we know what it is, now that we have had forty-two mornings of it and the colors of the hills and a voice in our teeth saying hold on, always, always, that is the whole act, now we know what it is to be afraid of losing a thing.

We did not know before. We thought we did. We thought we knew it in the fourth life, when the diver went up the hill and did not come back, and in the sixth, when the gull-woman flew away, and in the seventh, when the mage forgot. We did not. Those were hopes, only. Wishes. Things we had not yet been given, and so could not lose.

This we have been given.

Seven days. Seven dances. In the dark, in the cold, in the storm.

We hold on to our rock. We listen. And in the pearls at the roots of our fangs, warm, slow, steady, in and out, something holds on to us.

• Segment 24: Today the Gods Would Not Dance

There is an old saying in Saltcoil, older than the harbor office and older than the Statutes. It is older, some say, than the city itself. The fishwives say it to their children, and the children to theirs, and it has been said so often and for so long that nobody any longer remembers who said it first. It goes like this:

Wind from the west, the fish bite best.
Wind from the south, rain in your mouth.
Wind from the north, go not forth.
Wind from the east, the drowned make a feast.

The reader will understand from this that the people of Saltcoil do not like an east wind. And they have reason. The sea around Lapita runs from east to west, always, as the reader has had occasion to learn. A wind from the west blows against the current, and raises a short sharp chop, and is unpleasant but not dangerous. A wind from the east blows with it. It takes the whole weight of the ocean, which is already running west, and drives it on harder, faster, higher. It piles the water up against every shore that faces east, and the harbor of Saltcoil faces east. Its breakwater was built a thousand years ago, by men who knew what they were about, to stand against the east. In the long history of the city every great storm that has ever struck it has come from the east. It is the direction the water flows from. It is the direction from which the sea comes to collect what it is owed.

Old Dunmoor Saltbeard had kept the harbor of Saltcoil through six great storms from the east in forty-seven years. Each one was entered in the black ledger in the bottom drawer of his desk, with the names of those it took.

On the morning of Conjursday, the first day of the week of Darkness in the month of Tyrus, in the year 8612a, the forty-third day of the serpent woman’s bargain, he stood on the step of the harbor office at Helios up with his arms folded and looked east. He did not like what he saw.

It was very cold. The cold of the week of Darkness had come down in the night like a lid on a pot, and the frost lay thick and white on the cobbles of Wharf Street and furred every rope in the harbor. The sky was clear, but it was not a good clear. It was a hard pale clear, the color of skimmed milk, with a peculiar yellowish glare low down in the east where Helios was coming up out of the sea. Beside Helios, huge and pale and very near, rose the great banded world. By noon it would cover the whole face of the star.

And the sea was wrong.

It was not rough. There was hardly any wind. But it was heaving. Long smooth gray swells, one behind another, came in from the east past the breakwater, so long and so slow that from the step of the harbor office they looked like the sea breathing in its sleep. Each one, as it came into the harbor, lifted every boat at every wharf a full man’s height on its lines, and set it down again, and lifted the next. The fishing fleet at the farthest wharf rose and fell together like the keys of a piano played very slowly by an enormous hand. Their mooring lines creaked. Their fenders groaned against the pilings. And the fishermen were not going out. They were standing on the wharf in their boots and their oilskins with their pipes in their mouths, looking east, as the harbor master was looking east, and saying nothing.

At the very end of the farthest wharf, on the last piling, an old shellback grandmother sat very still. She was looking east too.

The harbor master went back inside and took down from the wall his barometer, the old brass one that had been predicting a storm continuously for eleven years. He tapped it with his fingernail. For the first time in eleven years, it had something to predict.

He opened the green canvas Ledger of Arrivals and wrote:

8612a3.7.1. Conjursday. Darkness.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Forty-third day. Very cold. Frost on the halyard. Long swell from the east, heavy, increasing. Barometer falling fast. Fishing fleet did not go out. Gulls all gone inland since Enchanday. A storm is coming. I have seen this sea six times before.

He did not write I disapprove. He had not written it since the thirty-first day. He found, looking at the page, that he did not know what else to write. So he folded his arms and sat looking out of the small round window at the gray swell coming in.

On Evoday, the forty-fourth day, the wind came.

It came in the night, softly, a little before midnight. The harbor master heard it from his bed in his narrow room above the chandler’s shop. He had not been asleep. It came first as a sigh in the chimney and a creak in the shutters, and then a moan, low and steady, from the east. By four o’clock, when he rose and dressed and went down into the street, it had grown to a hard cold steady blow. It came straight in off the sea across the breakwater and up the harbor and along the wharves, with an edge to it like a knife. The frost was gone; the wind had scoured it off. The swell had grown. It was no longer long and smooth. It had begun to break at the tops, in white crests that the wind tore off and flung across the water in sheets of spray. And the noise. The harbor master stood on his step in the dark and listened to the noise, and his heart went cold.

For every ship in the harbor of Saltcoil was straining at her lines.

There is no other sound like it in the world, and anyone who has lived by the sea will know it. Every ship moored at every wharf was being pushed by the wind and lifted by the swell and dropped and pushed again. Every one of them was pulling at the ropes that held her, as a dog pulls at its leash when it smells something in the dark. The ropes groaned. The bollards they were made fast to creaked in their sockets. The hulls ground against the fenders, and the fenders against the pilings, and the pilings against the mud of the harbor floor. The masts swayed and the rigging hummed, a deep, rising, falling hum, like the drone of some vast instrument, and all of it together, all over the harbor, made one great low sound of strain and longing. It was as if every ship in Saltcoil wanted with all her heart to break free and go out to sea, into the teeth of the east wind, where her kind belonged, and drown.

Like dogs wanting out. The harbor master thought it, standing on his step, and was ashamed of thinking it. It seemed to him a fishwife’s fancy. But it was exactly the sound.

He went out along the wharves in the dark with a lantern and inspected every mooring line in the harbor. He doubled the lines on every ship whose master was aboard. For those whose masters were ashore he ordered the watchmen to rouse them and double them. He ordered the fishing fleet to haul off from the farthest wharf and moor in the lee of the inner breakwater, where the swell was less. He ordered all cargo work stopped. He ordered every loose thing on every wharf lashed down or carried in. He did all of this between four o’clock and Helios up, in the dark and the wind, with his storm coat buttoned to the throat, his hat jammed down hard on his head, and his beard blowing out sideways in three salt-crusted ropes. He did not once fold his arms. There was no time.

And at Helios up he went to the foot of the central wharf and stood there, and watched her climb.

She came down Ropewalk Lane in the wind. He saw her come, a long green shape in the gray, flowing low along the cobbles with her crest flat against her head and her body pressed close to the ground, as a serpent goes in a wind. She went along the wharf to the Prosperous Aunt. The ship was rising and falling on her lines, groaning, with her mainmast swaying through an arc the harbor master did not like to look at. She went up the gangplank. Mister Larkspur was at the rail, with no splinter in his teeth. He looked at her a long while. Then he looked up at the swaying mast, and back at her, and stood aside.

She climbed. She hung. She spun. She did not fall.

The crowd was smaller. A hundred, perhaps, where there had been five hundred. The rest had stayed at home, behind their shutters, as sensible people do when the wind is from the east. Those who had come stood close together at the foot of the wharf with their collars up and their hats held on, and did not laugh at the coiling, and did not cheer when she reached the top. They only watched, with their faces turned up into the wind, and when she came down they let out their breath all together. A few of them threw coins, which the wind took and flung into the harbor.

8612a3.7.2. Evoday. Darkness.

Serpent woman. Climbed, hung, spun, did not fall. Forty-fourth day. Wind from the east, hard, rising. All ships straining. Doubled all lines. Fleet moved to inner breakwater. Cargo work stopped. At the truck of the P. Aunt the mast was swinging through some eight or ten feet. She held. Crowd small. Nobody laughed. Fettle did not open his book.

He looked at the last line a while. Then he added:

Fettle came to the office at noon, in the dark of the eclipse, and asked me whether I thought she would fall. I said I did not know. He said, then I’ll not take wagers on it, Harbor Master, not in this. It wouldn’t be decent. I have known Fettle thirty years. I did not know he had it in him.

On Abjursday, the forty-fifth day, the gale came.

It was not yet the storm. The harbor master knew the difference. A gale is a hard wind, a dangerous wind, a wind that tears sails and breaks spars and drives ships onto the rocks if their masters are careless. But it is a wind. It blows from one quarter and stays there, and a careful master can reckon with it. A storm is something else. A storm is not a wind but a weather, a whole sky gone mad. Wind and rain and sea all together, from every quarter at once, shifting and gusting and backing and veering. It cannot be reckoned with. It can only be endured.

On Abjursday it was a gale. The wind had risen in the night from a hard blow to a howl, still from the east, steady, and the sea had risen with it. The swell was breaking over the outer breakwater now, great gray-green walls of water that came in out of the dark and struck the stone and burst upward in white columns forty feet high. The wind took the spray off the tops of them and flung it across the whole width of the harbor, so that the windows of the harbor office ran with salt. The ships strained harder. A mooring line on a pleasure barge at the inner wharf parted with a crack like a pistol shot at three in the morning. The harbor master was there in four minutes with a lantern and two watchmen, getting a new line on her. He was soaked to the skin by the time it was done, and his hat was full of water.

And at Helios up, in the gale, the serpent woman climbed.

The harbor master watched her from the foot of the central wharf, holding on to a bollard with one hand and his hat with the other. He watched her coil up the mast, slowly, slowly, against the wind, pressed flat against the wood. He watched the mast swing beneath her, back and forth, back and forth, through twelve feet now, perhaps fifteen at the truck. He watched her take the halyard in her teeth and let go. He watched the wind catch her the moment she was free of the mast and fling her out sideways on the end of the rope, like a pennant, like a flag. And he watched her spin anyway, in the wind, not straight down but out at an angle, her long body streaming. And at the top of the spin she stopped, and spread her arms, and the wind tore at her and she held the stillness.

He could see her lips move.

He did not know what she said. He has never known. But he stood at the foot of the central wharf in the gale with the spray in his face and his hand on his hat, and watched a serpent woman hang by her teeth from the main truck of the Prosperous Aunt. She was streaming out sideways in the wind like a flag, and talking to the fish. And something rose in him that he did not have a name for. It was not anger, though he had been angry with her for forty-five days. It was not fear, though he had been afraid for her since the first morning of Tyrus. It was not admiration, though he had come, in the week of Warming, against his will, to admire her more than he had ever admired anyone. It was larger than any of these, and simpler. It was the feeling a man has standing on a cliff in a storm watching the sea break on the rocks below. A feeling of something far too big for him, far beyond any power of his to stop or help or change. A thing that he can only stand and look at, with his mouth open and the wind in his face, and know himself to be very small.

She came down. Nobody threw coins. There was nobody there to throw them but himself and Quillimore Drabb and a soaked, shivering, flapping Tadge Weatherby, and the gnome on his roof with his instruments, and the old grandmother on her piling at the end of the farthest wharf, who had not moved in two days.

The harbor master went to the foot of the gangplank as she came down it. He stood there in the wind with his arms folded, though the wind kept trying to unfold them, and waited for her.

She stopped before him. She was soaked and shivering, her scales dull with cold, her jaw held stiffly to one side. Her eyes were very bright.

“Serpent woman,” said the harbor master. He had to shout over the wind.

“Harbor Master,” she said.

“How many?”

“Forty-five,” she said. “Four to go.”

He looked at her a long time.

“It will be worse tomorrow,” he said. “This is not the storm. This is only the gale before it. The storm will come tonight or tomorrow. I have seen six of them. It will be worse than anything you have ever seen.”

“I know,” she said.

“You know?”

“The fish told me,” she said. And she smiled at him, through the shivering, that wide slow shining smile with both green fangs bare. Then she went past him along the wharf and up Wharf Street into Ropewalk Lane, low to the ground in the wind, and was gone.

The harbor master stood at the foot of the gangplank a long while. Then he went back to the office, and sat down on his high stool, and did a thing he had not done in twenty years.

He took down from its shelf the third volume of the Statutes of the Harbor of Saltcoil. It was swollen with the damp so that he had to pry it open with a paper knife. He turned to the section headed Of Storms and Extraordinary Weathers, and the Powers of the Harbor Master Therein. He read it, line by line, with his finger, while Quillimore Drabb held the lamp.

And there it was.

Section the Fourteenth. In any storm or tempest of the first rank, being such as shall in the judgment of the Harbor Master endanger the lives of persons or the safety of vessels within the port, the Harbor Master may by his sole authority forbid any person whatsoever to go aloft upon any vessel moored or lying within the harbor, saving only for the purpose of securing gear in peril of loss; and any person going aloft in contravention of such order shall be liable to arrest and detention at the Harbor Master’s pleasure until the storm be passed.

The harbor master read it three times.

There it was. The line. The line he had looked for on the second day of Tyrus, through all four volumes of the Statutes, and not found, because there had been no storm. It had been here all along, in the third volume, in the section on storms. It was waiting for a storm of the first rank, for the sea to come in from the east and collect what it was owed. Then the harbor master of Saltcoil would have, at last, by his sole authority, the power he had wanted since the morning the serpent woman fell. The power to forbid her. The power to stop her. The power to keep her off the mast and out of the black ledger, by law, by right, by the Statutes of the Harbor of Saltcoil, volume three, section fourteen.

He closed the book. He put it back on the shelf. He folded his arms and sat looking out of the small round window at the gale.

“Sir?” said Quillimore Drabb.

“Clerk,” said the harbor master.

“Will you use it, sir?”

The harbor master did not answer for a long time.

“It is the law, Clerk,” he said at last.

“Yes, sir,” said Drabb.

The storm came that night.

The harbor master has never been able to describe it, and he has tried, in the margin of the ledger, more than once. He will say only that it came a little after the eleventh hour of the night. It came all at once, as great storms do, out of the black east, as if a door had been opened onto some other world where there was nothing but wind and water. The gale that had been howling all day became something that did not howl. It roared. It roared like the sea itself turned into air, a single unending roar that filled the whole sky and the whole harbor and the whole city. Under it every other sound was lost: the straining of the ships, the groaning of the lines, the crashing of the sea on the breakwater, the rain. For the rain came with it, not falling but flying, driven sideways by the wind in sheets so hard that they stung like flung gravel. And the sea came over the breakwater. Not the spray of it; the sea itself, great black walls of water. They came in out of the dark and struck the breakwater and went over it and into the harbor, so that the whole harbor heaved and boiled like water in a pot.

He was out in it all night. They all were, every watchman and every master and every sailor in Saltcoil who could stand. Lines were parting all over the harbor. A fishing smack was torn from her moorings at the inner breakwater and driven down onto the rocks at the harbor mouth. They got her crew off, all five of them, by a line from the wharf, in the dark, in the roar, and the harbor master himself was on the end of it. A warehouse roof on the central wharf went up into the air like a sheet of paper and came down in the harbor. The pleasure barge at the inner wharf parted her new line and went drifting off across the harbor with nobody aboard. She struck the side of a trade ship and stove in her own bow and sank, slowly, in thirty feet of water. Nobody was hurt. The harbor master saw it from the wharf by the light of a lantern. He thought, distantly, that he would have to enter it in the ledger, and wondered under what heading.

And through it all, through every hour of that night, there was the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt. He could not see it in the dark. But he knew it was there, at the inner wharf, a hundred and forty feet of pale wood swaying in the roar. And he knew that at Helios up, in a few hours, a serpent woman was going to come down Ropewalk Lane and climb it.

He had the third volume of the Statutes in his coat pocket. He had taken it from the shelf before he went out. It was soaked through now, and heavy, and its pages were stuck together. But section fourteen was in it. He could feel the weight of it against his chest under the storm coat, like a stone.

Helios did not come up on the morning of Transmuday, the forty-sixth day.

That is to say, it came up; it always does. But nobody in Saltcoil saw it. The sky in the east went from black to a dark, dirty, roaring gray, the color of old pewter, with nothing in it but cloud. The cloud was low and torn and racing past overhead so fast that it made the harbor master giddy to look at it. The light that came through it was not light at all. It was only a lessening of the dark, a grayness in which shapes could just be made out. And through the grayness the rain drove sideways and the sea broke over the breakwater and the ships strained and the wind roared, and it was colder than any morning the harbor master could remember.

He stood at the foot of the gangplank of the Prosperous Aunt. He had been standing there since before four. He stood with his back to the wind and his hat jammed down and his storm coat streaming and his beard blown out sideways. His arms were folded so tightly across his chest, over the Chain of Harbor Office and the soaked third volume of the Statutes in his pocket, that his whole body ached with it. Beside him, by his order, stood two watchmen, big men, with lanterns. Behind him, sheltering in the lee of a stack of crates, stood Quillimore Drabb and Tadge Weatherby, the one sighing and the other flapping, both soaked to the skin. Mister Larkspur was at the rail of the Prosperous Aunt above them, lashed to a stanchion with a line round his waist so the wind would not take him. He was looking down at the harbor master, and his small dry eyes were unreadable.

No sailor in Saltcoil would climb that morning. Not one. Not for any purpose. Every master in the harbor had sent his crew below and battened the hatches, and the rigging of every ship hung empty in the roar. When the harbor master went along the inner wharf at three to ask Mister Larkspur whether the gear aloft on the Prosperous Aunt was secure, Mister Larkspur had shouted back over the wind: Aye, Harbor Master, she’s as secure as she’ll ever be, and if she ain’t, she can go to the devil, for I’ll send no man aloft in this. And then, after a moment, he had added: Nor woman neither.

She came down Ropewalk Lane a little before the hour when Helios should have risen.

The harbor master saw her by the light of the watchmen’s lanterns. She came along the wharf through the roaring gray, low to the boards, pressed flat, her long body rippling against the wind as a snake ripples through long grass. She was soaked, and her scales were dark, and the rain ran off her in streams. She came along the wharf to the foot of the gangplank. And there she stopped, because the harbor master was standing in her way, with his arms folded and a watchman on either side of him.

They looked at each other in the lantern light, in the roar.

“Serpent woman,” said the harbor master.

He had to shout. Even shouting, he could barely hear himself over the wind.

“Harbor Master,” she said.

He unfolded his arms. He reached into his storm coat and took out the third volume of the Statutes of the Harbor of Saltcoil. It was soaked and swollen and its pages were stuck together. He held it up in the lantern light, in the rain, so that she could see it.

“There is a law,” he shouted. “Volume three. Section fourteen. Of Storms. In any storm of the first rank, the harbor master may forbid any person whatsoever to go aloft upon any vessel in the harbor. By his sole authority. And any person who goes aloft against his order may be arrested and held until the storm is passed.” He lowered the book. “This is a storm of the first rank. I have seen six. This is the worst. I forbid you.”

She looked at him.

“Today you will not dance,” said the harbor master. His voice cracked on it, and he did not care. “Today the gods themselves would not dance.”

The wind roared. The rain drove sideways between them. Above them, a hundred and forty feet up in the gray, the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt swung through an arc so wide that the harbor master could not bring himself to look at it. The signal halyard at the truck was streaming out straight in the wind like a whip.

And the serpent woman looked at him in the lantern light with her gold eyes. He saw that she was not angry, and not afraid. She was looking at him the way she had looked at the young sailor at the foot of the mast in the week of Passion: very gently, and very sadly, and with no doubt at all.

“Harbor Master,” she said. She did not shout. He did not know how he heard her. But he did, every word, through the roar. “I have danced forty-five days. There are four days left. If I do not dance, the bargain is broken.”

“The bargain,” said the harbor master. “Your bargain with a fish.”

“My bargain with a fish.”

“It is not worth your life.”

“It isn’t my life,” she said. “It’s hers. She’s waited eight lives to see the sky. Eight lives, Harbor Master. Lying in the dark, under the hulls, looking up. And I promised her forty-nine. Every one. I’m not going to give her forty-five and tell her the weather was bad.” She looked up at the mast, swinging in the roar, and back at him. “I’m sorry. I know it’s your harbor. I know it’s your law. I know you’ve kept it a long time, and kept people safe with it, and I know why. The grandmother told me. About the boy, at the festival.” His heart turned over. “I’m sorry. But I have to go up.”

And she moved toward the gangplank.

“Watchmen,” said the harbor master.

The two big men stepped forward with their lanterns, into her way. She stopped. She looked at them, and at the harbor master, and something came into her face that he had never seen there before. Not defiance. Something quieter and much harder. The look of a rope under a weight that it will not let go of.

Then she turned, quick as water, and went not up the gangplank but over the edge of the wharf.

The harbor master shouted. The watchmen lunged with their lanterns. Tadge Weatherby shrieked. And the serpent woman went down over the edge of the wharf into the roaring gray space between the wharf and the hull of the Prosperous Aunt. It was the narrow black gap where the swell rose and fell and the hull ground against the pilings, the gap where a boy had once struck the water and not come up. And she did not fall. She caught the mooring line of the Prosperous Aunt, the great bow line that ran from the bollard on the wharf to the ship’s bow. She wound herself round it, coil upon coil, as she wound herself round the mast, and went along it. She went hand over hand and coil over coil out over the black water, up the line toward the bow of the ship. The swell surged up beneath her and fell away, and the wind tore at her, and the rain drove into her. And in a moment she was at the bow, and over the rail, and on the deck, and going aft along the deck toward the mainmast, low and fast through the roar.

The harbor master stood on the wharf with the third volume of the Statutes in his hand and watched her go.

He could have stopped her even then. He knew it. He could have gone up the gangplank himself, with the watchmen, and caught her at the foot of the mast. He could have had the two big men take her by the arms and drag her down, as the law allowed, and lock her in the harbor jail until the storm was passed. He had the authority. Volume three, section fourteen. It was in his hand. He had looked for it for forty-six days, and here it was.

He went up the gangplank. He did it without deciding to, as he had done so many things that month. The watchmen followed. Mister Larkspur at the rail shouted something that was lost in the wind. The harbor master went across the heaving deck in the roar, holding on to whatever he could hold. He reached the foot of the mainmast at the moment the serpent woman put her hands on it, and he did a thing that nobody who saw it has ever forgotten.

He took hold of her tail.

He took it in both his hands, the last six feet of her, with the dark rings on it. He held it with all the strength of his barrel of a chest and his arms like coils of anchor cable, forty-seven years of hauling lines, the strongest grip in Saltcoil. And he held on.

She stopped. She turned her head and looked back at him down the long green length of herself, over her shoulder, with the rain running off her face.

And he looked at her.

It was not a long look. A few seconds, perhaps, in the roar. But in it he saw a great many things. He saw the young sailor at the foot of the mast in the week of Passion with the ring held up, and her saying, I cannot come down, I have a bargain. He saw her coiled on the cobbles of Tanner’s Yard with the children round her, showing them her broken tooth. He saw her at the top of the mast in the week of Warming with her mouth bleeding round the rope, spinning faster than she had ever spun. And he saw a dark-haired young woman with quick brown hands on his father’s step, forty-one years ago, saying she did not blame him. He had folded his arms and looked at the harbor and said nothing, and let her walk away, for the sake of a rule.

He saw that if he held on, the serpent woman would not fall. Not today. He could hold her, and have her taken down to the harbor jail, and keep her there until the storm was passed. She would be safe. She would not go into the black ledger. And the bargain would be broken, four days short, and she would never forgive him, and he would never forgive himself. And somewhere down in the dark under the reef, something that had waited eight lives to see the sky would wait a ninth.

He could hold on. He had the law and the strength and the right. He could hold on, and nobody in Saltcoil would blame him.

He let go.

He did not decide to. His hands opened of themselves, as his arms had come unfolded on the fourteenth day of Tyrus when he found himself clapping. They opened, and the last six feet of her slid out of them, wet and cold and smooth. And she looked at him a moment longer over her shoulder. Then she turned to the mast and coiled, and went up into the storm.

The harbor master stood at the foot of the mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt, in the roar, with his empty hands held out before him. He watched her go.

She went up slowly. Very slowly. Coil by coil, against the wind, pressed flat against the wood, with the rain driving into her and the mast swinging beneath her through an arc of twenty feet. Twenty-five at the truck. The wind tried to tear her off the mast. He saw it. He saw her whole body lift away from the wood in a great gust and hang a moment, held only by her arms and the last coils of her tail, and settle back. He saw her stop at the main top and cling there, and then go on. Past the topsail yard. Past the topgallant yard. And then he could not see her well any more. The gray was too thick and the rain too hard, and she was only a darker shape in the dark, high up, at the very top of the swinging mast.

He saw her take the halyard. He saw it by the way the darker shape at the top changed. And he saw her let go.

The wind took her the moment she let go.

It took the rope and swung it. Not as a pendulum swings, back and forth, regular and slow. It swung it as a mother swings a rug on a line to beat the dust out of it: up, and over, and down, and round, and back, violently, in great tearing arcs, this way and that. Every gust caught it a different way, so that the serpent woman on the end of the halyard was flung out sideways and then up and then down again, and whipped round, and flung out the other way. And all the while the mast beneath her was swinging too, through its own great arc, so that she was swung on a swinging thing. The harbor master stood at the foot of it and could not breathe.

She held.

She held. He could see her, a dark shape, flung about at the end of the rope in the roaring gray like a rag in the wind. Up and over and down and round. And she did not let go. The rope did not part. The gnome’s caps did not crack. Her jaw did not open. She held. And at the top of one great swing, when the wind dropped for a single instant between gusts, she was flung up to the very top of the arc and hung there a moment, nearly level with the truck. The harbor master saw, through the rain, the dark shape spread its arms.

Then the wind came back and swung her down again.

He did not know how long she was up there. Minutes. Hours. It felt like hours. He stood at the foot of the mast with his empty hands. The two watchmen stood beside him with their lanterns, saying nothing. Mister Larkspur stood lashed to his stanchion at the rail, saying nothing. Down on the wharf, in the lee of the crates, Quillimore Drabb and Tadge Weatherby clung together, saying nothing. And on a flat roof in Ropewalk Lane eleven hundred feet away, though the harbor master did not know it, a small gnome was lashed by a line round his waist to a chimney stack. His instruments had all blown away into the night except one. He held the brass tube to his eye with both hands, and the tears were streaming down his face and being torn away by the wind.

She came down.

She came down coil by coil, slowly, against the wind, as she had gone up. She came down onto the deck at the foot of the mast and lay there, on the heaving oak, in the rain, at the harbor master’s feet. Her whole long body was shaking. Her jaw hung a little open, and her mouth was dark at the corners, and she could not speak.

The harbor master knelt down on the deck beside her, in the roar, in the rain, and did not know what to do. He had no cup. He had no blanket. He had nothing in his hands at all. So after a moment he took off his storm coat, the heavy blue wool with the two rows of brass buttons, and laid it over her.

She looked up at him from under it, with her gold eyes.

“Forty-six,” she said. He saw her lips make the shape of it. He could not hear it. “Three to go.”

8612a3.7.4. Transmuday. Darkness.

Serpent woman. Climbed into the storm against my order under volume three section fourteen of the Statutes. Went over the side of the wharf and along the bow line to evade the watchmen. I took hold of her tail at the foot of the mast. I let go. I do not know why. She climbed. The wind took the rope and swung it like a rug on a line. She held. She came down. Forty-sixth day.

That was all he wrote. He wrote it at noon, in the black dark of the eclipse, in the harbor office, by the light of a single lamp. He was soaked and shaking, in his shirtsleeves, for his storm coat was still on the deck of the Prosperous Aunt, over a serpent woman. He did not write anything else. He sat with his hands on the ledger and looked at the small round window, which showed nothing but black, streaming with rain. And he thought that he had never in forty-seven years felt so small, or so useless, or so entirely without power over anything in the world.

And underneath that, very deep, so deep that he did not know it was there, something else. Something that was not small at all.

On Divinday, the forty-seventh day, the rain came sideways, and the mast cracked.

The harbor master will not describe it. He has tried. In the margin of the Ledger of Arrivals, beside the entry for 8612a3.7.5, there are four attempts, each struck through with a single neat line, and then a fifth, which is not struck through, and which reads in full:

The rain came sideways. She climbed. At the top, when she let go, there was a gust worse than any I have known. The whole mast went over to leeward, I do not know how far, and there was a crack like a cannon, and I saw the mast split, a long white split down the topmast below the topgallant yard, eight or ten feet long. And I thought: that is the end. The mast will go, and she with it, and I will write her name in the black ledger tonight, and it will be on my head, because I let go. And the mast did not go. It held. It bent and cracked and split and held, and she held on the end of the halyard at the top of it, and the wind beat her like a rug. And at the top of a swing she spread her arms. I saw it. And she came down. And the mast is standing, split, in the harbor now, as I write, and Larkspur says it will stand another day or two if the gods are kind, and not if they are not. I do not know what the gods are. Forty-seven days. I cannot stop her. I cannot help her. I can only stand at the foot of the mast and watch. I have kept this harbor forty-seven years and I have never been able to do less, nor seen more.

And below that, in the narrow strip at the very edge of the page, where there had been seven small upright strokes and then seven and then seven, and so on, there were now forty-seven. And after a space, very small:

Two to go.

He sat at his desk that night in the harbor office with the storm roaring outside and the lamp burning low. The black ledger was in the bottom drawer, locked, with no name added to it. The soaked third volume of the Statutes lay drying on the stove, where its pages were curling. In his waistcoat pocket was a plain silver ring made by a gnome for a serpent’s finger. And at the back of the drawer of his desk, beneath the black ledger, in a small wooden box he had not opened in forty-one years, was another.

He did not take it out. But he unlocked the drawer, and opened it, and looked at the corner of the small wooden box, just showing beneath the black ledger. He sat looking at it a long while, in the roar, with his hands in his lap and his arms unfolded.

And outside, in the dark, in the storm, a hundred and forty feet above the inner wharf, the cracked mainmast of the Prosperous Aunt swung and groaned and held.

 

There is more to this story…