Chapter 13 The Fifth Waymark

Reading a stone at a bad angle is an exercise in subtraction. Zeyla had done it twice before, both times in the dark of a country church, and both times she had come away with a headache and a lesson. The problem was never the stone. It was the light, which failed, and the time, which ran, and the body, which complained. She had perhaps forty minutes before her neck and her eyes stopped reporting accurately, and she began counting them the moment she began. She stood on the stone shelf at the foot of the pier with her back to the river and her face turned up into the overhang, and Tufan held the lamp on the bank with his coat over it and moved it when she lifted a hand. The stone was the second course above the waterline, a block the size of a small door, and its lower face was not the face she had expected. It was not carved at all. It was smooth, dressed, and blank, and for thirty seconds she thought she had the wrong block, and then she ran her thumb along the shadowed upper edge and found the seam, and understood. The inscription was not on the face of the block. It was on the block's outer edge, in the narrow band where the stone met its neighbor, a strip four centimeters wide and a meter long, cut into the joint so that the letters would be closed up by the adjacent stone and would only become visible when the bridge was repaired. He had hidden the text in a joint. He had hidden it in the one part of a wall that every mason in the world knows must be cut back for mortar, and he had counted on the fact that no mason, ever, would look at a joint for a message. Zeyla worked along the seam with her fingertips, letter by letter, saying each one aloud so that Tufan could hear it and remember it with her. The cold came up off the river and into her hands, and her fingers went from precise to clumsy, and somewhere around the twentieth character the light on the bank flickered and went out, and then came back, and then a second light appeared beside it on the far end of the bridge. She did not stop. A surveyor does not stop reading because someone has arrived. She read the last eleven characters with her eyes closed, giving them to Tufan and to the notebook she could not open and to the memory that had been trained by a woman who had said that a road tries to forget itself and that the surveyor's job is to remind it. Then she stepped back off the shelf and put the pier between herself and the bridge, and the men on the parapet began to shout. "Six men," Tufan said, from the bank. "Two on the bridge, four on the road. They have spread out along the parapet." He had the rifle up, not aimed. "They are not shooting. Someone has told them not to shoot." "They want the reading," Zeyla said. "They want me to finish it. That is the only reason I am alive." She was shaking hard, and the shaking had nothing to do with the cold. "Tufan. Whoever told them not to shoot is not Sundur. Sundur shoots. Someone with rank is standing on that bridge, and it is not Kulin, because Kulin would have come down to talk." They went up the west bank through the willows, staying low, and behind them the lights fanned out along the parapet and then came down the bank in a line, searching the reeds, and one of them passed within four meters of the willow where Zeyla was standing and did not see her, because she had learned in fifteen years of fieldwork that a person standing absolutely still in cover is more invisible than a person crouching in motion. What happened next happened fast and, afterward, in her memory, out of order. There was a shout from the eastern bank. There was a shot, and then two more, and the shots were not aimed at her but at something on the road above the bridge, and the searching line broke and turned and ran back up the bank, and in the confusion a truck engine rose and fell and rose again, and then a man came out of the willows on the far side of the river and waded the ford without any attempt at concealment, and stood on the gravel in the light of the abandoned lamp with his hands in his coat pockets. "There is a fire on the road," he said, in careful, academic English. "Both of their vehicles are burning. I arranged it. It buys us perhaps twenty minutes, and then they will understand that the fire did not start itself, and they will come back." Ilgaz Kulin stood in the ford with the water running around his expensive boots and looked, for the first time in fifteen years, like a man who had made a decision he could not unmake. "Miss Arkut," he said. "I have something to tell you, and I would rather tell it to you before Bekir Sundur's men find you, because it is not the kind of thing that survives a witness." Zeyla did not move. "You took the fourth stone at Nekhab." "I did." "You burned the roof at Yelviran." "I did not. That was Sundur's men, in the spring, before I joined them properly. I have spent six months trying to keep them from burning the rest." He took his hands out of his pockets, and they were empty. "I am the person who has been putting counterfeit stones into their supply. I have been doing it for four years. I did not know, until Merlak, that anyone else was reading them. And I did not know, until you went to Yelviran, that Mehve Devral was your grandmother. If I had known that, I would have written to you years ago." The river ran. On the road above the bridge, a fire was climbing into the dark and throwing orange light across the underside of the arch, and the fifth waymark lay in its joint in the masonry, unread by anyone but Zeyla, holding its number and its direction and its fragment of a road. "Say it," Zeyla said. "The ledger is written twice," Kulin said. "Once in the nine stones. And once, three hundred years ago, in a copy that Sarpel made for the person he trusted with the key." ---