THERE · The sixth winter’s thaw · fourteen
The Little Oss took the footbridge on the second night of the thaw. We heard it go from Orrin’s house, under the noise of the ice, a crack and then a long grinding, like a cart going over on stones, and in the morning the whole village was on the bank looking at two stone piers with nothing between them and the brown water going through at the height of a man’s chest.
The Little Oss is not a big river. In summer a child can wade it. It comes down off the Hem through the orchards and into the Oss below Hessary, and the orchards are on the far side of it, all the sour cherry and half the walnut, and in six weeks the sella would be red on the trees and every cart in Hessary would need to cross.
Orrin stood on the bank with his hands behind his back and looked from the near pier to the far one, and the orchard-keepers waited behind him, because it was his bridge and his father’s before him, and his arch was cut into the capstone of the near pier where anyone could see it.
“Bigger beams,” he said. “Oak, from the high wood. The fir was too light.”
The orchard-keepers nodded. They were glad that somebody knew what to do.
I had been with Orrin five winters by then. I split and squared and hauled and held the other end of things, and I was fourteen, and my wrists came out of my sleeves, and Orrin said that I ate like a flood.
I had also been out on the bank the evening before the bridge went, when the water was coming up, and I had watched it. The beams had not broken. The water came against the side of the bridge and pushed, and the posts that held the rail leaned downstream, all of them together, and the deck went sideways under them, and the whole thing folded over flat like a box that someone has stepped on. Then the water had it. The beams were whole when they went past me. I saw them turning in the brown water with the pegs still in them.
So bigger beams would not help. Bigger beams would fold the same way, only heavier.
I did not say this. A Given boy with no fire does not tell a master of the guild what his bridge did. I had learned that at nine, the first time I asked Orrin why, and he had looked at me as if a stool had spoken.
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I could not remember my father’s face.
I had tried, the winters before, and it had gone slowly and then all at once, the way the color goes out of cloth left in the sun, and by fourteen when I reached for it there was only a shape against a window and a beard that might have been anyone’s. I still had my mother’s. I kept hers by saying her name into the fire every night. I had not known that a face needed feeding.
But I had his voice. That night, lying awake on the pallet in Orrin’s loft with the thaw booming down on the Oss, I found it without looking for it. It was saying something to me about a box. I was sitting on a bucket in the sun with a can of iron pins in my lap, and there was a smell of cut wood that was not any wood that grows in this valley, and a tool in my hands that turned the pins into the wood by itself, with a sound like an angry bee, and for which there is no word in the valley. And the voice was above me, and it put a piece of wood across the corner of a frame, and pushed on the corner with one finger.
Box’ll fold on you. Triangle won’t. Triangles don’t rack.
I lay there and said it to myself in English until I was sure of every word. Then I got up and went down the ladder.
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There is a stand of willow along the Little Oss below the dyers’ yard, and I cut an armful of the straightest withies by starlight and brought them into Orrin’s shed and shut the door. I needed a light, and a light in the shed at night would be seen from the house, so I went and woke Tam.
Tam was nine that winter, Senna’s brother, and he would do anything for dried cherries and nothing at all for love. He held the lamp for a handful a night and complained in a whisper the whole time.
I built it the length of my forearm, two sides and a deck, but I made each side a row of triangles leaning one way and then the other, pinned at every corner with thorn, and I tied the sides together with more triangles, so that there was no square anywhere in it that could lean. On the third night Senna came to the shed door, because Tam could not keep anything to himself, and looked at it with her arms crossed and said that it looked like a fish skeleton, and went away again. On the fourth night I finished it. I pushed on the corner of it with one finger, the way the voice had, and it did not move.
I meant to carry it out to the bank in the morning and set it down in front of Orrin and say nothing. But I fell asleep in the shed, and when I woke it was light, and the model was gone from the bench.
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He had it out in the yard on his work table, the heavy one his father had made from a single slab of walnut, and he was standing over it with his hands behind his back.
I stood in the shed door. I thought he would put it in the fire, and I would not blame him, because I had taken his shed and his lamp oil without asking and built something to tell him he was wrong.
He did not look at me. He went to where the river stones were piled for the new wall, and picked one up, the size of a fist, and set it in the middle of the deck.
The model did not move.
He went and got another, and another. He did not hurry, and he did not speak, and every time he set a stone down he bent and put his eye to the level of the deck and looked along it, the way he looked along a beam to see if it was true. Tam came out of the house with his mouth full of bread, and stopped. Then Senna came, and two women from the dyers’ yard, and after a while half the top of Hessary was standing along Orrin’s wall watching the veshwright pile stones on a fish skeleton.
When the deck was full he began stacking them on top of each other. The willow creaked, and it held. He had to reach up to put on the last ones.
Then there was a crack like a green branch, loud, and everyone along the wall stepped back, and the stones went sliding and thundering down onto the flagstones, and Orrin’s father’s walnut table lay in two pieces on the ground with the split running clean through it from one end to the other.
The model was sitting on the flagstones between the halves. One thorn pin had come out. Otherwise it was the way I had made it.
Orrin looked at the table.
“That was my father’s,” he said.
One of the dyer women put her hand over her mouth.
He bent down, slowly, because of his knees, and picked up the model in both his wide scarred hands, and held it up close to his face and turned it, and looked at every corner of it. Then he raised his eyes to me for the first time that morning.
“Show me,” he said.
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We built it in eleven days.
It was not the model. The model had been a boy’s idea, and the bridge had to carry carts. Orrin made me draw it on a board with charcoal, over and over, and every time he found something wrong. My triangles were too flat and would bend in the middle, so we made them steeper. He showed me how to cut a joint where three timbers come together so that each one holds the other two. He took the oak from the high wood after all, but he cut it thinner than he had meant to, and he did not say anything about that.
We worked from first light to full dark. On the seventh day my hands bled through the wrappings and Senna put her mother’s salve on my palms herself, without being gentle about it, and told me that I smelled like a wet goat.
On the eleventh day we set the last pin, and Orrin walked out onto the middle of it and jumped. He was a big man, even thin, and he landed hard, and the bridge took it and did not answer.
Six weeks after that, the first sella carts came across from the orchards piled so high with fruit that the juice ran out through the slats, and the bridge did not lean, and the carters did not even look down.
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The evening we finished, Orrin sent me for his mallet and his smallest chisel. He knelt on the bank at the near pier, beside his arch, on the new stone we had set on top of the old capstone to carry the timbers, and he cut a mark into it. It took him a long time. His hands did not close all the way and the chisel kept slipping. When he was done he sat back on his heels and blew the dust out of it.
It was a triangle. Three straight cuts, each as long as my finger, meeting at the corners.
“That is your mark,” he said.
I said that the Given could not hold a seal. I said it before I could stop myself, because I had wanted a mark for five winters and was afraid that if I took this one somebody would come and take it back.
“A seal is a seal,” Orrin said. He got up, one hand on the pier. “A mark is a mark. Ask the bridge whose it is.”
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That night, when the house was asleep, I took the smallest chisel out of the shed again.
Orrin’s door was oak, set in a frame of old walnut gone nearly black with smoke and hands. I knelt on the step. I did not cut it where a man would put a mark, at the height of his eyes. I measured with my hand from the sill, up the frame, to the height of my own chest when I came over the Hem at eight years old in a shirt with a shark on it, which by then was lower than my belt. And there I cut a triangle into the frame, small, no longer than the first joint of my thumb, three cuts, meeting at the corners, so that if my father came looking, he would know which door.