Chapter 12 The Kavil Ford

The Kavil river in late summer was not a river. It was a wide, braided bed of gravel and boulders with a thread of green water running at the bottom of it, and the ford, which had served the caravan road for six centuries, was a shelf of flat rock where the water spread thin and the animals could cross without swimming. Above the ford, on the far bank, a stone bridge carried the modern road, and beside the bridge's western arch, where the parapet met the abutment, a plaque had been set into the masonry recording repairs, and among the repairs, in a list that went back four hundred years, was a date that matched the resetting of the fifth stone. Zeyla read the plaque from the water, standing knee-deep in the ford with her boots tied around her neck, and the water was colder than the air and moved faster than it looked, and she had to brace herself against the current with every step. Tufan had gone ahead to check the bridge's far side, and the mule stood on the near bank with the packs, and the afternoon was quiet in the specific way that an afternoon is quiet before a person realizes it has been quiet for too long. The gunshot came from the bridge. It was a single round, flat and loud in the riverbed, and it struck the water ten meters downstream of her, and Zeyla did not stop to reason. She went for the bank, and the second shot came, and the third, and then a voice from the parapet, raised and unhurried, told her to stand still and she would not be hurt. She stood still. Two men came down the bank from the bridge, one on either side, and a third stayed on the parapet with a rifle still trained on the ford, and Zeyla stood in the shallow water with her hands at her sides and did the arithmetic she had been doing since Torvak. There was no Kulin this time. There were only men in good boots, and they were not interested in her. They were interested in the packs on the mule. "Leave the animal," the older of them said. "Take the bags and go back to the road, and nothing else happens today." She could have refused. She could have done any number of things that would have ended with her on the gravel, and the arithmetic said no, and so she took the packs off the mule and stepped back, and the men went through them with the methodical speed of people who had done this often. They took the camera. They took the rubbing case, which held three rubbings, two of which she had already copied into the notebook and one of which she had not finished transcribing. They took the food and the waterskins. They left the mule, and the bedrolls, and a tin cup, and they left the notebook, because the notebook was not in the packs at all. It was against her ribs, in the oilcloth, under her shirt, and she had spent the crossing moving it there, and they never asked her to lift her arms. When they had gone up the bank and the truck had started and pulled away toward the bridge, Zeyla waded out of the ford and sat down on the gravel and put her head in her hands and did not move for a long moment. Tufan came down the far bank at a run, having circled back through the willows when he heard the shots, and found her sitting in the open with her boots in her lap and her face gray and her hands shaking, and he said nothing, and sat down beside her, and waited. "Three rubbings," she said at last. "The two I had copied are in the notebook. The third I had not finished. The last four characters are gone." She lifted her head. "And they have my camera, which means they have the photographs of the stones at Tavras and at Yelviran, and they have the plates from the bridge." "Then we have less than we had." "We have the bridge itself," Zeyla said. She stood, and pulled on her boots, and looked at the arch where the plaque was set, and at the courses of dressed stone above it, and at the place, visible now that she was looking for it, where the masonry did not match its neighbors. "The plaque records the repairs. But it does not record what was built into the bridge at the repair. The ford was shot at from the parapet because they knew we would come here. Which means they know what is under that stone." She looked at the arch. "So we read it before they come back for it, and we read it now." They crossed the ford together in the last of the light, and Zeyla did not look back at the place where the packs had been taken, because looking back was a way of paying interest on a debt she did not intend to keep. On the far bank, in the shelter of the bridge, she sat down with the notebook against her knee and did the one thing that the men in good boots had not counted on. She reconstructed the missing characters of the third rubbing from memory, in pencil, in the margin, marking each one as reconstructed so that no future reader would mistake it for the original. It took her an hour. Tufan stood watch at the abutment, and the river ran under the bridge with a sound like a crowd at a distance, and by the time the moon came up she had the whole inscription again, uncertain in four places and complete in the rest. "Now the bridge," she said. The plaque's date had told her where to look, and the masonry told her the rest. Sarpel had not built his marker into the bridge. He had done something cleverer. He had set it into the repair, which meant that the village masons who rebuilt the arch four hundred years later had, without knowing it, reset a stone that had been cut in the sixteenth century and carved on the face they turned inward. The marker was the replacement block itself, mortared into the outer face of the west pier, above the high-water stain, and the carving was hidden under a course of stone that overhung it like a brow. Nobody on the deck would see it. Nobody in the water would think to look up. But from the ridge of loose stone at the foot of the pier, where a fisherman might stand to cast, there was one angle, and one only, from which the letters came into view. Zeyla climbed onto the stone shelf at the foot of the pier and stood there, dry to the knees, and tilted her head back. The lamp was behind her, held by Tufan from the bank and angled up under the overhang, and in its light the characters appeared in the shadow of the brow: a column cut four hundred years ago into a stone that everyone since had believed was only holding up a road. ---