At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (41 page)

“No,” Brana said. She was crying, too. “I know, that’s what we wanted to hope. But Asa, one of the strangers, the high-workers; she was working overhead and heard the boat capsize, heard him cry out. She couldn’t see anything and didn’t know what she had heard until we figured it out.”

“Three more months,” Kit said mostly to himself. He saw Brana looking at him so he clarified: “Three more months. The bridge would have been done. This wouldn’t have happened.”

“This was today,” Brana said, “not three months from now. People die when they die. We grieve and move on, Kit. You’ve been with us long enough to understand how we see these things. Here’s the tray.”

When Kit returned, Rasali was asleep. He watched her in the dark room, unwilling to light more than the single lamp he’d carried up with him.
People die when they die.
But he could not stop thinking about the bridge, the nearly finished deck.
Another three months. Another month.

When she awakened, there was a moment when she smiled at him, her face weary but calm. Then she remembered and her face tightened and she started crying again. After a while Kit got her to eat some bread and fish and cheese and drink some watered wine. She did so obediently, like a child. When she was finished she lay back against him. Her matted hair pushed up into his mouth.

“How can he be gone?”

“I’m so sorry,” Kit said. “The bridge was so close to finished. Three more months, and this wouldn’t have—”

She pulled away. “What? Wouldn’t have happened? Wouldn’t have
had
to happen?” She stood and faced him. “His death would have been unnecessary?”

“I—” Kit began but she interrupted him, new tears streaking her face.

“He
died
, Kit. It wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t irrelevant, it wasn’t anything except the way things are. But he’s gone and I’m not and
now
what do I do, Kit? I lost my father and my aunt and my sister and my brother and my brother’s son, and now I lose the mist when the bridge is done and then what? What am I then? Who are the Ferry people then?”

Kit knew the answer. However she changed, she would still be Rasali. Her people would still be strong and clever and beautiful. The mist would still be there, and the Big Ones. But she wouldn’t be able to hear these words, not yet, not for months maybe. So he held her and let his own tears slip down his face and tried not to think.

Five years after the Oncalion bridge was completed, Kit was two years into building an aqueduct planned across the Bakyar valley. There were problems. The first stones could not sustain both the weight of the aqueduct and the water it was meant to carry. His predecessor on the project had been either incompetent or corrupt, and Kit was still sorting through the mess she had left behind. They were a season behind schedule, but when he heard about Davell Meinem’s death, he left immediately for Atyar. Some time would be required to put his father’s affairs in order but mostly he did not wish to miss Twentieth-day, when Davell would be remembered. Kit had known that Davell’s death would leave a hole in him, but he had known his father was dying for years. He hadn’t expected this to hurt as much as it did.

The Grayfield was a little amphitheatre Davell had designed when he was young, matured now to a warm half-circle of white stone and grass, fringed with cherry trees. It was a warm day, brilliantly sunny. The air smelled of honey-cakes and the last of the cherry blossoms. Kit was Davell’s only child, so he stood alone at the red-tasseled archway to greet those who came. He was not surprised at how many came to honor his father, more and more until the amphitheatre overflowed, the honey-cakes were all eaten, and the silver bowls were filled with flowers, one from each mourner. Davell Meinem had built seven bridges, three aqueducts, a forum, two provincial complexes, and innumerable smaller projects, and he had maintained contacts with old friends from each of them; many more people had liked him for his humor and his kindness.

What surprised Kit was all the people who had come for
his
sake: fellow students, tutors, old lovers and companions, even the man who ran the wine shop he frequented whenever he was in the city. Many of them had never even met his father. He had not known that he was part of their patterns.

Five months later, when he was back in the Bakyar valley, a letter arrived wrapped in dirty oiled paper and clearly from far away. It was from the miners of Oncalion. “We heard about your father from a trader when we were asking about you,” the letter said. “We are sorry for your loss.”

The fairs to celebrate the opening of the bridge started days before the official date of Midsummer. Representatives of Empire, from Atyar and Triple, from the regional governors and anyone else who could contrive an excuse all polished their speeches and waited impatiently in suites of tents erected on hurriedly cleaned-up fields near (but not too near) Nearside. The town had bled northward until it surrounded the west pillar of the bridge. The land that had once been sheep-pasture—Sheepfield, it was now—at the foot of the pillar was crowded with fair tents and temporary booths, cheek by jowl with more permanent shops of wood and stone that sold food and the sorts of products a traveler might find herself needing.

Kit was proud of the new streets. He had organized construction of the crosshatch of sturdy cobblestones as something to do while he waited through the bridge’s final year. The new wells had been a project of Jenner’s, planned from the very beginning, but Kit had seen them completed. Kit had just received a letter from Jenner with news of his new mist bridge up in the Keitche mountains: on schedule, a happy work site. It was gneiss bedrock, so he was using explosives and had hired Liu Breaker for it; she was there now and sent her greetings.

Kit walked alone through the fair which had climbed the levee and established itself along the ridge. A few people, townspeople and workers, greeted him but others only pointed him out to their friends (
the man who built the bridge; see there, that short dark man
); and still others ignored him completely, just another stranger in a crowd of strangers. When he had first come to build the bridge everyone in Nearside knew everyone else, local or visitor. He felt solitude settling around him again, the loneliness of coming to a strange place and building something and then leaving. The people of Nearside were moving forward into this new world he had built, the world of a bridge across the mist, but he was not going with them.

He wondered what Rasali was doing over in Farside, and wished he could see her. They had not spoken since the days after Valo’s death except once for a few minutes when he had come upon her at The Bitch. She had been withdrawn though not hostile. He had felt unbalanced and not sought her out since.

Now, at the end of his great labor, he longed to see her. When would she cross next? He laughed. He of all people should know better:
ten minutes’ walk.

The bridge was not yet officially open but Kit was the architect. The guards at the toll booth only nodded when he asked to pass and lifted the gate for him. A few people noticed and gestured as he climbed. When Uni Mason (hands filled with fairings) shouted something he could not hear clearly, Kit smiled and waved and walked on.

He had crossed the bridge before this. The first stage of building the heavy oak frames that underlay the roadbed had been a narrow strip of planking that led from one shore to the other. Nearly every worker had found some excuse for crossing it at least once before Empire had sent people to the tollgates. Swallowing his fear of the height, Kit himself had crossed it nearly every day for the last two months.

This was different. It was no longer his bridge but belonged to Empire and to the people of Nearside and Farside. He saw it with the eyes of a stranger.

The stone ramp was a quarter of a mile long, inclined gradually for carts. Kit hiked up, and the noises dropped behind and below him. The barriers that would keep animals (and people) from seeing the drop-off to either side were not yet complete: there were always things left unfinished at a bridge’s opening, afterthoughts and additions. Ahead of him, the bridge was a series of perfect dark lines and arcs.

The ramp widened as it approached the pillar, and offered enough space for a cart to carefully turn onto the bridge itself. The bed of the span was barely wide enough for a cart with two oxen abreast, so Nearside and Farside would have to take turns sending wagons across.
For now,
Kit thought.
Later we can widen it, or build another. They.
It would be someone else.

The sky was overcast with high clouds the color of tin, their metallic sheen reflected in the mist below Kit. There were no railings, only fishskin ropes strung between the suspension cables that led up to the chains. Oxen and horses wouldn’t like that, or the hollow sound their feet would make on the boards. Kit watched the deck roll before him in the wind, which was constant from the southwest. The roll wasn’t so bad in this wind but perhaps they should add an iron railing or more trusses to lessen the twisting and make crossing more comfortable. Empire had sent a new engineer to take care of any final projects: Jeje Tesanthe at Atyar. He would mention it to her.

Kit walked to one side so that he could look down. Sound dropped off behind him, deadened as it always was by the mist. He could almost imagine that he was alone. It was several hundred feet down, but there was nothing to give scale to the coiling field of hammered metal below him. Deep in the mist he saw shadows that might have been a Big One or something smaller or a thickening of the mist, and then, his eyes learning what to look for, he saw more of the shadows, as though a school of fish were down there. One separated and darkened as it rose in the mist until it exposed its back almost immediately below Kit.

It was dark and knobby, shiny with moisture, flat as a skate, and it went on forever—thirty feet long perhaps, or forty, twisting as it rose to expose its underside or what he thought might be its underside. As Kit watched, the mist curled back from a flexing scaled wing of sorts, and then a patch that might have been a single eye or a field of eyes or something altogether different, and then a mouth like the arc of the suspension chains. The mouth gaped open to show another arc, a curve of gum or cartilage. The creature rolled and then sank and became a shadow and then nothing as the mist closed back over it.

Kit had stopped walking when he saw it. He forced himself to move forward again. A Big One, or perhaps just a Medium-Large One. At this height it hadn’t seemed so big or so frightening. Kit was surprised at the sadness he felt.

Farside was crammed with color and fairings as well, but Kit could not find Rasali anywhere. He bought a tankard of rye beer and went to find some place alone.

Once it became dark and the Imperial representatives were safely tucked away for the night, the guards relaxed the rules and let their friends—and then any of the locals—on the bridge to look around. People who had worked on the bridge had papers to cross without charge for the rest of their lives but many others had watched it grow, and now they charmed or bribed or begged their way onto their bridge. Covered lamps were permitted, though torches were forbidden because of the oil that protected the fishskin ropes. From his seat on the levee, Kit watched the lights move along the bridge, there and then hidden by the suspension cables and deck, dim and inconstant as fireflies.

“Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

Kit stood and turned to the voice behind him. “Rasali Ferry of Farside.” She wore blue and white, and her feet were bare. She had pulled back her dark hair with a ribbon and her pale shoulders gleamed. She glowed under the moonlight like mist. He thought of touching her, kissing her, but they had not spoken since just after Valo’s death.

She stepped forward and took the mug from his hand, drank the lukewarm beer, and just like that the world righted itself. He closed his eyes and let the feeling wash over him.

He took her hand and they sat on the cold grass and looked out across the river. The bridge was a black net of arcs and lines. Behind it the mist glowed blue-white in the light of the moons. After a moment he asked, “Are you still Rasali Ferry, or will you take a new name?”

“I expect I’ll take a new one.” She half-turned in his arms so that he could see her face, her eyes. “And you? Are you still Kit Meinem, or do you become someone else? Kit Who Bridged the Mist? Kit Who Changed the World?”

“Names in the city do not mean the same thing,” Kit said absently. “
Did
I change the world?” He knew the answer already.

She looked at him for a moment as though trying to gauge his feelings. “Yes,” she said slowly after a moment. She turned her face up toward the loose strand of bobbing lights: “There’s your proof, as permanent as stone and sky.”

“ ‘Permanent as stone and sky,’ ” Kit repeated. “This afternoon—it flexes a lot, the bridge. There has to be a way to control it but it’s not engineered for that yet. Or lightning could strike it. There are a thousand things that could destroy it. It’s going to come down, Rasali. This year, next year, a hundred years from now, five hundred.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “All these people, they think it’s forever.”

“No, we don’t,” Rasali said. “Maybe Atyar does, but we know better here. Do you need to tell a Ferry that nothing will last?
These
cables will fail eventually,
these
stones will fall—but not the
dream
of crossing the mist, the dream of connection. Now that we know it can happen, it will always be here. My father died. My sister Rothiel. My brother Ster. Valo.” She stopped, swallowed. “Ferrys die, but there is always a Ferry to cross the mist. Bridges and ferryfolk, they are not so different, Kit.” She leaned forward, across the space between them, and they kissed.