At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

by Kij Johnson

  “I will. I was, I mean, but I came out because I thought maybe I could find you, because—” The boy was shivering.

  “Where are your friends? Let’s get you inside. It’ll be better there.”

  “No,” he said. “I have to know first. It’s like this always? If I do this, build things, it’ll happen for me? Someone will die?”

  “It might. It probably will, eventually.”

  Valo said an unexpected thing: “I see. It’s just that she had just gotten married.”

  The blood on Loreh’s lips, the wet sound of her crushed chest as she took her last breaths—“Yes,” Kit said. “She had.”

  “I just … I had to know if I need to ready for this. I guess I’ll find out.”

  “I hope you don’t have to.” The rain was getting heavier. “You should be inside, Valo.”

  Valo nodded. “Rasali—I wish she were here. She could help maybe. You should go in too. You’re shivering.”

  Kit watched him go. Valo had not invited him to accompany him back into the light and the warmth. He knew better than to expect that, but for a moment he had permitted himself to hope otherwise.

  Kit slipped through the stables and through the back door at The Bitch. Wisdon Innkeep, hands full of mugs for the taproom, saw him and nodded, face unsmiling but not hostile. That was good, Kit thought, as good as it would get tonight.

  He entered his room and shut the door, leaned his back to it as if to hold the world out. Someone had already been in his room. A lamp had been lit against the darkness, a fire laid, and bread and cheese and a tankard of ale set by the window to stay cool. He began to cry.

  The news went across the river by signal flags. No one worked on the bridge the next day or the day after that. Kit did all the right things, letting his grief and guilt overwhelm him only when he was alone, huddled in front of the fire in his room.

  The third day, Rasali arrived from Nearside with a boat filled with crates of northland herbs on their way east. Kit was sitting in The Bitch’s taproom, listening. People were coping, starting to look forward again. They should be able to get back to it soon, the next clear day. He would offer them something that would be an immediate, visible accomplishment, something different, perhaps guidelining the ramp.

  He didn’t see Rasali come into the taproom, only felt her hand on his shoulder and heard her voice in his ear. “Come with me,” she murmured.

  He looked up puzzled, as though she were a stranger. “Rasali Ferry, why are you here?”

  She said only, “Come for a walk, Kit.”

  It was raining but he accompanied her anyway, pulling a scarf over his head when the first cold drops hit his face.

  She said nothing as they splashed through Farside. She was leading him someplace but he didn’t care where, grateful not to have to be the decisive one, the strong one. After a time she opened a door and led him through it into a small room filled with light and warmth.

  “My house,” she said. “And Valo’s. He’s still at the boatyard. Sit.”

  She pointed and Kit dropped onto the settle beside the fire. Rasali swiveled a pot hanging from a bracket out of the fire and ladled something into a mug. She handed it to him and sat. “So. Drink.”

  It was spiced porter and the warmth eased the tightness in his chest. “Thank you.”

  “Talk.”

  “This is such a loss for you all, I know,” he said. “Did you know Loreh well?”

  She shook her head. “This is not for me, this is for you. Tell me.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, and when she didn’t say anything, he repeated with a flicker of anger: “I’m fine, Rasali. I can handle this.”

  “Probably you can,” Rasali said. “But you’re not fine. She died and it was your bridge she died for. You don’t feel responsible? I don’t believe it.”

  “Of course I feel responsible,” he snapped.

  The fire cast gold light across her broad cheekbones when she turned her face to him, but she said nothing, only looked at him and waited.

  “She’s not the first,” Kit said, surprising himself. “The first project I had sole charge of, a toll gate. Such a little project, such a silly little project to lose someone on. The wood frame for the passageway collapsed before we got the keystone in. The whole arch came down. Someone got killed.” It had been a very young man, slim and tall with a limp. He was raising his little sister. She hadn’t been more than ten. Running loose in the fields around the site, she had missed the collapse, the boy’s death. Dafuen? Naus? He couldn’t remember his name. And the girl—what had her name been? I should remember. I owe that much to them.

  “Every time I lose someone,” he said at last, “I remember the others. There’ve been twelve in seventeen years. Not so many, considering. Building’s dangerous. My record’s better than most.”

  “But it doesn’t matter, does it?” she said. “You still feel you killed each one of them, as surely as if you’d thrown them off a bridge yourself.”

  “It’s my responsibility. The first one, Duar—” that had been his name; there it was. The name loosened something in Kit. His face warmed: tears, hot tears running down his face.

  “It’s all right,” she said. She held him until he stopped crying.

  “How did you know?” he said finally.

  “I am the eldest surviving member of the Ferry family,” she said. “My father died. My mother. My aunt died seven years ago. And then I watched my brother leave to cross the mist, three years ago now. It was a perfect day, calm and sunny, but he never made it. He went instead of me because the river felt wrong to me that day. It could have been me. It should have, maybe. So I understand.”

  She stretched a little. “Not that most people don’t. If Petro Housewright sends his daughter to select timber in the mountains and she doesn’t come back—eaten by wolves, struck by lightning, I don’t know—is Petro to blame? It’s probably the wolves or the lightning. Maybe it’s the daughter, if she did something stupid. And it is Petro, a little; she wouldn’t have been there at all if he hadn’t sent her. And it’s her mother for being fearless and teaching that to her daughter, and Thom Green for wanting a new room to his house. Everyone except maybe the wolves feels responsible. This path leads nowhere. Loreh would have died sooner or later.” Rasali added softly, “We all do.”

  “Can you accept death so readily?” he asked. “Yours even?”

  She leaned back, her face suddenly weary. “What else can I do, Kit? Someone must ferry and I am better suited than most—and by more than my blood. I love the mist, its currents and the smell of it and the power in my body as I push us all through. Petro’s daughter Cilar—she did not want to die when the wolves came, I’m sure, but she loved selecting timber.”

  “If it comes for you?” he said. “Would you be so sanguine then?”

  She laughed and the pensiveness was gone. “No indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.”

  At University, Kit’s relationships had all been casual. There were lectures that everyone attended, and he lived near streets and pubs crowded with students; but the physical students had a tradition of keeping to themselves that was rooted in the personal preferences of their predecessors and in their own. The only people who worked harder than the engineers were the ale-makers, the University joke went. Kit and the other physical students talked and drank and roomed and slept together.

  In his third year, he met Domhu Canna at the arcade where he bought vellums and paper: a small woman with a heart-shaped face and hair in black clouds that she kept somewhat confined by gray ribbons. She was a philosophical student from a city two thousand miles to the east, on the coast.

  He was fascinated. Her mind was abrupt and fish-quick and made connections he didn’t understand. To her, everything was a metaphor, a symbol for something else. People, she said, could be better understood by comparing their lives to animals, to the seasons, to the structure of certa
in lyrical poems, to a gambling game.

  This was another form of pattern-making, he saw. Perhaps people were like teamed oxen to be led, or like metals to be smelted and shaped to one’s purpose, or like the stones for a dry-laid wall, which had to be carefully selected for shape and strength, sorted, and placed. This last suited him best. What held them together was not external mortar but their own weight and the planning and patience of the drystone builder. But it was an inadequate metaphor. People were this, but they were all the other things as well.

  He never understood what Domhu found attractive in him. They never talked about regularizing their relationship. When her studies were done halfway through his final year, she returned to her city to help found a new university, and in any case her people did not enter into term marriages. They separated amicably and with a sense of loss on his part at least, but it did not occur to him until years later that things might have been different.

  The winter was rainy but there were days they could work and they did. By spring, there had been other deaths unrelated to the bridge on both banks: a woman who died in childbirth, a child who had never breathed properly in his short life, two fishers lost when they capsized, several who died for the various reasons that old or sick people died.

  Over the spring and summer they finished the anchorages, featureless masses of blocks and mortar anchored to the bedrock. They were buried so that only a few courses of stone showed above the ground. The anchoring bolts were each tall as a man, hidden behind the portals through which the chains would pass.

  The Farside pillar was finished by midwinter of the third year, well before the Nearside tower. Jenner and Teniant Planner had perfected a signal system that allowed detailed technical information to pass between the banks, and Kit took full advantage of it. Documents traveled each time a ferry crossed. Rasali made thirty-eight trips. Though he spent much of his time with Kit, Valo made nineteen. Kit did not cross the mist at all unless the flags told him he must.

  It was early spring and Kit was in Farside when the signals went up: Message. Imperial seal. He went to Rasali at once.

  “I can’t go,” she said. “I just got here yesterday. The Big Ones—”

  “I have to get across and Valo’s at Nearside. There’s news from the capital.”

  “News has always waited before.”

  “No it hasn’t. News waited restlessly, pacing along the levee until we could pick it up.”

  “Use the flags,” she said impatiently.

  “The seals can’t be broken by anyone but me or Jenner. He’s over here. I’m sorry,” he said, thinking of her brother, dead four years before.

  “If you die no one can read it,” she said, but they left just after dusk anyway. “If we must go, better then than earlier or later.”

  He met her at the upper dock at dusk. The sky was streaked with bright bands of green and gold, clouds catching the last of the sun so that they glowed but radiated no light. The current down the river was steady. The mist between the levees was already in shadow, smooth dunes twenty feet high.

  Rasali waited silently, coiling and uncoiling a rope in her hands. Beside her stood two women, a man, and a dog: dealers in spices returning from the plantations of Gloth, the dog whining and restless. Kit was burdened with document cases filled with vellum and paper rolled tightly and wrapped in oilcloth. Rasali seated the merchants and their dog in the ferry’s bow, their forty crates of cinnamon and nutmeg amidships, Kit in the back near her. In silence she untied and pushed away from the dock.

  She stood at the stern, braced against the scull. For a moment he could pretend that this was water they moved on and he half expected to hear sloshing, but the big paddle made no noise. It was so quiet that he could hear her breath, the dog’s nervous panting in front, and his own pulse, too fast. Then the Crossing slid up the long smooth slope of a dune and there was no possibility that this could be anything but mist.

  He heard a soft sighing, like air entering a once-sealed room. It was hard to see so far, but the lingering light showed him mist heaving on the face of a neighboring dune, like a bubble coming to the surface of mud. The dome grew and then burst. There was a gasp from one of the women. A shape rolled away, too dark for Kit to see more than its length.

  “What—” he said in wonder.

  “Fish,” Rasali breathed to Kit. “Not small ones. They are biting tonight. We should not have come.”

  It was night now. The first tiny moon appeared, followed by stars. Rasali oared gently through the dunes, face turned to the sky. At first he thought she was praying but she was navigating. There were more fish now: each time the sighing sound, the dark shape half seen. He heard someone singing, the voice carrying somehow, from far behind.

  “The fishers,” Rasali said. “They will stay close to the levees tonight. I wish… .”

  But she left the wish unspoken. They were over the deep mist now. He could not say how he knew this. He had a sudden vision of the bridge overhead, a black span bisecting the star-spun sky, the parabolic arch of the chains perhaps visible, perhaps not. People would stride across the river an arrow’s flight overhead, unaware of this place beneath. Perhaps they would stop and look over the bridge’s railings but they would be too high to see the fish as any but small shadows—supposing they saw them at all, supposing they stopped at all. The Big Ones would be novelties, weird creatures that caused a safe shiver, like hearing a frightening story late at night.

  Perhaps Rasali saw the same thing for she said suddenly, “Your bridge. It will change all this.”

  “It must. I am sorry,” he said again. “We are not meant to be here on mist.”

  “We are not meant to cross this without passing through it. Kit—” Rasali said as though starting a sentence and then fell silent. After a moment she began to speak again, her voice low, as though she were speaking to herself. “The soul often hangs in a balance of some sort. Tonight do I lie down in the high fields with Dirna Tanner or not? At the fair, do I buy ribbons or wine? For the new ferry’s headboard, do I use camphor or pearwood? Small things. A kiss, a ribbon, a grain that coaxes the knife this way or that. They are not, Kit Meinem of Atyar. Our souls wait for our answer because any answer changes us. This is why I wait to decide what I feel about your bridge. I’m waiting until I know how I will be changed.”

  “You never know how things will change you,” Kit said.

  “If you do not, you have not waited to find out.” There was a popping noise barely a stone’s throw to starboard. “Quiet.”

  On they moved. In daylight, Kit knew, the trip took less than an hour but now it seemed much longer. Perhaps it was. He looked up at the stars and thought they had moved but perhaps not.

  His teeth were clenched, as were all his muscles. When he tried to relax them, he realized it was not fear that cramped him but something else, something outside him. Rasali’s stroke faltered.

  He recognized it now, the sound that was not a sound, like the deepest pipes on an organ, a drone too low to hear but which turned his bones to liquid and his muscles to flaked and rusting iron. His breath labored from his chest in grunts. His vision narrowed. Moving as though through honey, he strained his hands to his head, cradling it. He could not see Rasali except as a gloom against the slightly less gloom of the mist but he heard her pant, tiny pain-filled breaths like an injured dog.

  The thrumming in his body pounded at his bones now, dissolving them. He wanted to cry out but there was no air left in his lungs. He realized suddenly that the mist beneath them was raising itself. It piled up along the boat’s sides. I never got to finish the bridge, he thought. And I never kissed her. Did Rasali have any regrets?

  The mound roiled and became a hill, which became a mountain obscuring part of the sky. The crest melted into curls and there was a shape inside, large and dark as night itself, that slid and followed the collapsing mist. It seemed not to move, but he knew that was only because of the size of the thing, that it took ages for its full length to pa
ss. That was all he saw before his eyes slipped shut.

  How long he lay there in the bottom of the boat, he didn’t know. At some point he realized he was there. Some time later he found he could move again, his bones and muscles back to what they should be. The dog was barking. “Rasali?” he said shakily. “Are we sinking?”

  “Kit.” Her voice was a thread. “You’re still alive. I thought we were dead.”

  “That was a Big One?”

  “I don’t know. No one has ever seen one. Maybe it was just a Fairly Large One.”

  The old joke. Kit choked on a weak laugh.

  “Shit,” Rasali said in the darkness. “I dropped the oar.”

  “Now what?” he said.

  “I have smaller spares, but it’s going to take longer and we’ll land in the wrong place. We’ll have to tie off and then walk up to get help.”

  I’m alive, he did not say. I can walk a thousand miles tonight.

  It was nearly dawn before they got to Nearside. The two big moons rose just before they landed, a mile south of the dock. The spice traders and their dog went on ahead while Kit and Rasali secured the boat and walked up together. Halfway home, Valo came down at a dead run.

  “I was waiting and you didn’t come—” He was pale and panting. “But they told me, the other passengers, that you made it and—”

  “Valo.” Rasali hugged him and held him hard. “We’re safe, little one. We’re here. It’s done.”

  “I thought… .” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “Valo, please, I am so tired. Can you get the Crossing up to the dock? I am going to my house and I will sleep for a day, and I don’t care if the Empress herself is tapping her foot, it’s going to wait.” She released Valo, saluted Kit with a weary smile, and walked up the long flank of the levee. Kit watched her leave.

  The “Imperial seal” was a letter from Atyar, some underling arrogating authority and asking for clarification on a set of numbers Kit had sent—scarcely worth the trip at any time, let alone across mist on a bad night. Kit cursed the capital, Empire, and the Department of Roads, and then sent the information along with a tautly worded paragraph about seals and their appropriate use.