At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (33 page)

Kit examined some of the blocks. Limestone was often too chossy for large-scale construction but this rock was sound, with no apparent flaws or fractures. There were not enough, of course, but undoubtedly more had been quarried. He had written to order resumption of deliveries and they would start arriving soon.

Delivered years too early, the iron trusses that would eventually support the roadbed were stacked neatly, painted black to protect them from moisture, covered in oiled tarps, and raised from the ground on planks. Sheep grazed the knee-high grass that grew everywhere. When one eyed him incuriously, Kit found himself bowing. “Forgive the intrusion,” he said and laughed: too old to be talking to sheep.

The test pit was still open, with a ladder on the ground nearby. Weeds clung when he moved the ladder as though reluctant to release it. He descended.

The pasture had not been noisy but he was startled when he dropped below ground level and the insects and whispering grasses were suddenly silenced. The soil around him was striated shades of dun and dull yellow. Halfway down, he sliced a wedge free with his knife: lots of clay, good foundation soil as he had been informed. Some twenty feet down, the pit’s bottom looked like the walls, but when he crouched to dig at the dirt between his feet with his knife, he hit rock almost immediately. It seemed to be shale. He wondered how far down the water table was. Did the Nearsiders find it difficult to dig wells? Did the mist ever backwash into one? There were people at University in Atyar who were trying to understand mist, but there was still so much that could not be examined or quantified.

He collected a rock to examine in better light and climbed from the pit in time to see a teamster approaching, leading four mules, her wagon groaning under the weight of the first new blocks. A handful of Nearsider men and women followed, rolling their shoulders and popping their joints. They called out greetings and he walked across to them.

When he got back to The Fish hours later, exhausted from helping unload the cart and soaked from the storm that had started while he did so, there was a message from Rasali.
Dusk
was all it said.

Kit was stiff and irritable when he left for
The Tranquil Crossing
. He had hired a carrier from The Fish to haul one of his trunks down to the dock but the others remained in his room, which he would probably keep until the bridge was done. He carried his folio of plans and paperwork himself. He was leaving duplicates of everything on Nearside, but after so much work it was hard to trust any of it to the hands of others.

The storm was over and the clouds were moving past, leaving the sky every shade between lavender and a rich purple-blue. The largest moon was a crescent in the west, the smaller a half circle immediately overhead. In the fading light, the mist was a dark, smoky streak. The air smelled fresh. Kit’s mood lightened and he half-trotted down the final slope.

His fellow passengers were there before him: a prosperous-looking man with a litter of piglets in a woven wicker cage (Tengon whites, the man confided, the best bloodline in all Empire); a woman in the dark clothes fashionable in the capital, with brass-bound document cases and a folio very like Kit’s; two traders with many cartons of powdered pigment; a mail courier with locked leather satchels and two guards. Nervous about their first crossing, Uni and Tom Mason greeted Kit when he arrived.

In the gathering darkness the mist formed tight-folded hills and coulees. Swifts darted just above the surface, using the wind flowing up the valley, searching for insects, he supposed. Once a sudden black shape, too quick to see clearly, appeared from below. Then it, and one of the birds, was gone.

The voices of the fishers at their dock carried to him. They launched their boats and he watched one and then another and then a gaggle of the little coracles push themselves up a slope of the mist. There were no lamps.

“Ready, everyone?” Kit had not heard Rasali approach. She swung down into the ferry. “Hand me your gear.”

Stowing and embarkation were quick, though the piglets complained. Kit strained his eyes but the coracles could no longer be seen. When he noticed Rasali waiting for him, he apologized. “I guess the fish are biting.”

Rasali glanced at the river as she stowed his trunk. “Small ones. A couple of feet long only. The fishers like them bigger, five or six feet, though they don’t want them too big, either. But they’re not fish, not what you think fish are. Hand me that.”

He hesitated a moment, then gave her the folio before stepping into the ferry.
The Tranquil Crossing
sidled at his weight but sluggishly: a carthorse instead of a riding mare. His stomach lurched. “Oh!” he said.

“What?” one of the traders asked nervously. Rasali untied the rope holding them, pulled it into the boat.

Kit swallowed. “I had forgotten. The motion of the boat. It’s not like water at all.”

He did not mention his fear but there was no need. The others murmured assent. The courier, her dark face sharp-edged as a hawk, growled, “Every time I do this, it surprises me. I dislike it.”

Rasali unshipped a scull and slid the great triangular blade into the mist, which parted reluctantly. “I’ve been on mist more than water but I remember the way water felt. Quick and jittery. This is better.”

“Only to you, Rasali Ferry,” Uni Mason said.

“Water’s safer, anyway,” the man with the piglets said.

Rasali leaned into the oar and the boat slid away from the dock. “Anything is safe until it kills you.”

The mist absorbed the quiet sounds of shore almost immediately. One of Kit’s first projects had been a stone single-arch bridge over water, far to the north in Eskje province. He had visited before construction started, and he was there for five days more than he had expected, caught by a snowstorm that left nearly two feet on the ground. This reminded him of those snowy moonless nights, the air as thick and silencing as a pillow on the ears.

Rasali did not scull so much as steer. It was hard to see far in any direction except up, but perhaps it was true that the mist spoke to her for she seemed to know where best to position the boat for the mist to carry it forward. She followed a small valley until it started to flatten and then mound up. The
Crossing
tipped slightly as it slid a few feet to port. The mail carrier made a noise and immediately stifled it.

Mist was a misnomer. It was denser than it seemed. Sometimes the boat seemed not to move through it so much as across its surface. Tonight it seemed like the dirty foam that strong winds could whip from Churash Lake’s waves, near the western coast of Empire. Kit reached a hand over the boat’s side. The mist piled against his hand, almost dry to the touch, sliding up his forearm with a sensation he could not immediately identify. When he realized it was prickling, he snatched his arm back in and rubbed it on a fold of his coat. The skin burned. Caustic, of course.

The man with the pigs whispered, “Will they come if we talk or make noise?”

“Not to talking or pigs’ squealing,” Rasali said. “They seem to like low noises. They’ll rise to thunder sometimes.”

One of the traders said, “What are they if they’re not really fish? What do they look like?” Her voice shook. The mist was weighing on them all, all but Rasali.

“If you want to know you’ll have to see one for yourself,” Rasali said. “Or try to get a fisher to tell you. They gut and fillet them over the sides of their boats. No one else sees much but meat wrapped in paper or rolls of black skin for the ropemakers and tanners.”

“
You’ve
seen them,” Kit said.

“They’re broad and flat. But ugly.”

“And Big Ones?” Kit asked.

Her voice was harsh. “
Them
we don’t talk about here.”

No one spoke for a time. Mist—foam—heaped up at the boat’s prow and parted, eased to the sides with an almost inaudible hissing. Once the mist off the port side heaved and something dark broke the surface for a moment, followed by other dark somethings, but they were not close enough to see well. One of the merchants cried without a sound or movement.

The Farside levee showed at last, a black mass that didn’t get any closer for what felt like hours. Fighting his fear, Kit leaned over the side, keeping his face away from the surface. “It can’t really be bottomless,” he said half to himself. “What’s under it?”

“You wouldn’t hit the bottom, anyway,” Rasali said.

The Tranquil Crossing
eased up a long swell of mist and into a hollow. Rasali pointed the ferry along a crease. And then they were suddenly a stone’s throw from the Farside dock and the light of its torches.

People on the dock moved as they approached. Just loudly enough to carry, a soft baritone voice called, “Rasali?”

She called back, “Ten this time, Pen.”

“Anyone need carriers?” A different voice. Several passengers responded.

Rasali shipped the scull while the ferry was still some feet away from the dock, and allowed it to ease forward under its own momentum. She stepped to the prow and picked up a coiled rope there, tossing one end across the narrowing distance. Someone on the dock caught it and pulled the boat in, and in a very few moments the ferry was snug against the dock.

Disembarking and payment was quicker than embarkation had been. Kit was the last off and after a brief discussion he hired a carrier to haul his trunk to an inn in town. He turned to say farewell to Rasali. She and the man—Pen, Kit remembered—were untying the boat. “You’re not going back already,” he said.

“Oh, no.” Her voice sounded loose, content, relaxed. Kit hadn’t known how tense she was. “We’re just going to tow the boat down to where the Twins will pull it out.” She waved with one hand to the boat launch. A pair of white oxen gleamed in the night, at their heads a woman hardly darker.

“Wait,” Kit said to Uni Mason and handed her his folio. “Please tell the innkeeper I’ll be there soon.” He turned back to Rasali. “May I help?”

In the darkness he felt more than saw her smile. “Always.”

The Red Lurcher, more commonly called The Bitch, was a small but noisy inn five minutes’ walk from the mist, ten (he was told) from the building site. His room was larger than at The Fish, with an uncomfortable bed and a window seat crammed with quires of ancient hand-written music. Jenner stayed here, Kit knew, but when he asked the owner (Widson Innkeep, a heavyset man with red hair turning silver), he had not seen him. “You’ll be the new one, the architect,” Widson said.

“Yes,” Kit said. “When he gets in, please tell Jenner I am here.”

Widson wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t know, he’s been out late most days recently, since—” He cut himself off, looking guilty.

“—since the signals informed him that I was here,” Kit said. “I understand the impulse.”

The innkeeper seemed to consider something for a moment, then said slowly, “We like Jenner here.”

“Then we’ll try to keep him,” Kit said.

When the child Kit had recovered from his illness, he did not return to the crèche—which he would have been leaving in a year in any case—but went straight to his father. Davell Meinem was a slow-talking humorous man who nevertheless had a sharp tongue on the sites of his many projects. He brought Kit with him to his work places: best for the boy to get some experience in the trade.

Kit loved everything about his father’s projects: the precisely drawn plans, the orderly progression of construction, the lines and curves of brick and iron and stone rising under the endlessly random sky.

For the first year or two, Kit imitated his father and the workers, building structures of tiny beams and bricks made by the woman set to mind him, a tiler who had lost a hand some years back. Davell collected the boy at the end of the day. “I’m here to inspect the construction,” he said, and Kit demonstrated his bridge or tower, or the materials he had laid out in neat lines and stacks. Davell would discuss Kit’s work with great seriousness until it grew too dark to see and they went back to the inn or rented rooms that passed for home near the sites.

Davell spent nights buried in the endless paperwork of his projects, and Kit found this interesting as well. The pattern that went into building something big was not just the architectural plans or the construction itself; it was also labor schedules and documentation and materials deliveries. He started to draw his own plans but he also made up endless correspondences with imaginary providers.

After a while, Kit noticed that a large part of the pattern that made a bridge or a tower was built of people.

The knock on Kit’s door came very late that night, a preemptory rap. Kit put down the quill he was mending and rolled his shoulders to loosen them. “Yes,” he said aloud as he stood.

The man who stormed through the door was as dark as Kit, though perhaps a few years younger. He wore mud-splashed riding clothes.

“I am Kit Meinem of Atyar,” Kit said.

“Jenner Ellar of Atyar. Show it to me.” Silently Kit handed the cartel to Jenner, who glared at it before tossing it onto the table. “It took long enough for them to pick a replacement.”

Might as well deal with this right now,
Kit thought. “You hoped it would be you.”