第3章 The Cracking

By the time Ilsa's son was born, the Aan had been dry for two years. The birth was difficult. There was no midwife in the village anymore — the last one had left for the eastern towns the previous autumn, when the stores ran low and the roads south were still passable. Ilsa's neighbor, a woman named Hesta who had birthed six children of her own, helped her through it, and the child came into the world screaming with a fury that seemed, to Ilsa, almost appropriate. The world he was born into had given him every reason to scream. She named him Daan. It was a name from the valley — there had been several Daans in the ledger's history, men who had tended the river in their own way, who had fished and farmed and built and repaired. She chose it deliberately, as an act of continuity, because continuity was becoming harder and harder to find. Daan grew in the drought. His earliest memories were not of water but of its absence: the cracked earth of the riverbed, the dust that rose from the valley floor in clouds that turned the sunlight yellow, the dry wind that blew through the Shoulders and brought with it the smell of distant places that had rain. He learned to walk on ground harder than stone, ground that had once been silt and was now baked into a surface so rigid that his bare feet left prints that lasted for days. Ilsa carried him on her hip through the village, and she carried the ledger under her arm, and the two weights were, in her mind, inseparable. The child and the record. The future and the past. She would set him down on the floor of the baker's shop while she sat at her desk and wrote, and sometimes she would read to him from the ledger — not the numbers, but the passages her mother had written at the back of the book, the prayers to the water, the observations about the river's moods. "The Aan gives," she would read, and Daan would look up from his play with eyes that were dark and serious and already, at three or four years old, carrying knowledge no child should have to bear. He did not know what the Aan gave. He had never seen it give anything. The river his mother described — the river that surged in spring and murmured in summer and retreated in autumn and fell silent in winter — existed only in the ledger and in Ilsa's voice. To Daan, the Aan was a dry channel that ran through the valley like a scar, and the stories his mother told about water were as distant and fantastical as the stories other mothers told about giants and magic. He did not believe her. Not exactly. He believed that she believed, and he believed the ledger contained truth because his mother would not lie to him, but the truth it contained was a truth about something that no longer existed, and he could not reconcile it with the world he saw around him. The valley was dry. The river was dry. The sky was dry. Water was a memory, and memories were unreliable, and the ledger was a book of memories written down. He told her this when he was seven — the same age she had been when her father first carried her across the Aan. They were sitting on the flat stone in the middle of the riverbed, which was now just a large boulder in a field of gravel, and Daan was studying the stone's surface with the same concentration his mother brought to the ledger. "The stone is smooth," he said. "Yes. The water made it smooth." "But there is no water." "There was water. That is why it is smooth." "How do you know?" "Because my mother told me. And her mother told her. And so on, back to the beginning." "But you don't know. You only know what they told you." Ilsa looked at her son and saw, with a clarity that hurt, the distance between them. He was a child of the drought. He had been born into absence and he understood absence as presence, as the natural state of things. To him, the river was not a living thing that had fallen silent but a dead thing that had never lived. The ledger was a collection of stories about something that might or might not have happened, told by people who might or might not have been telling the truth. She could not argue with him. He was right, in his way. She had never seen the Aan flow — not really. She had seen it low and she had seen it dry, and the river her mother described, the river that filled the valley from bank to bank and sang in a voice that could be heard from the far side of the Shoulders, existed for her only in words and numbers. The ledger was her only proof, and proof was a thin thing when the evidence was gone. But she did not stop writing. She did not stop watching. Even when the Aan was nothing but a dry channel and the valley was nothing but dust, she continued to climb to the measuring stone every morning and scratch a mark on its surface and record the date in the ledger. The mark was always the same — zero, the river's lowest possible state — and the entry was always the same: no water, no rain, no change. But she wrote it anyway, because the act of recording was itself a form of belief, and belief was the only thing separating her from the dust. The village changed around her. Families left. Not all at once but steadily, in ones and twos, following the roads south and east to places where water still flowed. The baker left first, then the carpenter, then the woman who ran the cloth shop. The stone hall fell empty, its doors hanging open to the wind. The houses along the riverbank, built from the same stone as the Veldt homestead, stood hollow and dark, their windows like eyes that had stopped seeing. By the time Daan was ten, the village of Kessal had shrunk from two hundred souls to thirty. The thirty who remained were the old, the stubborn, and the incapable — those who could not leave because they had nowhere to go, or would not leave because they could not imagine a life not defined by the valley and the dry river that ran through it. Ilsa was in the second category. She was thirty-seven years old, and she had spent her entire life in the Kessal valley, and she did not know how to be anything other than what she was: the keeper of the ledger, the watcher of the absent river, the woman who sat by the window and wrote down the fact of the drought every day, as if writing it down might eventually give it an end. Daan was in the first category. He could not leave because he was a child and his mother would not go. He grew up in the emptied village like a plant growing in a pot that had run out of soil, reaching for something that was not there. He was a quiet boy, serious beyond his years, with hands that were always moving — turning stones over, testing the hardness of the ground, scratching patterns in the dust. He had his mother's eyes but not her patience. He wanted to understand the world, but the world he wanted to understand was not the world of the ledger. It was the world outside the valley, the world his father had gone to find, a world where things made sense on their own terms rather than in relation to a river that no longer existed. He asked about his father. Ilsa answered honestly: Gideon had gone south, she did not know where, she had not heard from him. It was possible he was dead. It was possible he had started a new family. It was possible he was standing somewhere in the lowlands, looking north toward the mountains and the valley and the woman he had left behind. "Do you hate him?" Daan asked. "I don't know," Ilsa said. "I think I understand him. That is different from hating." "What is it like to understand someone you might hate?" "It is like reading the ledger. You see the numbers and you know they are true, but you wish they said something different." Daan considered this. He was eight, and the concept was almost but not quite within his reach. He filed it away in the part of his mind where he kept the things his mother told him — the part that was separate from his own understanding, the part that held her world rather than his. The drought entered its fifth year. Then its seventh. Then its tenth. The numbers in the ledger repeated themselves with a monotony that was almost meditative: no water, no rain, no change. Ilsa wrote them with a hand growing as stiff as her mother's had been, and the pen scratched against the paper with a sound that was, in the silence of the emptied village, the loudest thing in the world. Daan grew. He became a tall boy with broad shoulders and long arms, built for labor the valley no longer required. He spent his days in the empty houses, exploring rooms that had been abandoned, turning over the objects their former owners had left behind: a wooden spoon, a clay pot, a child's wooden horse with one ear missing. He arranged these objects in patterns on the floors, creating installations that no one saw but him, temporary monuments to the lives that had been lived and then moved on. He was, without knowing it, doing what his mother did: recording absence. Where she used words and numbers, he used objects. Where she sat at her desk and wrote in the ledger, he knelt on the floor and arranged his found things into shapes that meant something to him and to no one else. They were both keepers of the void, the mother and the son, and the void was all they had. Ilsa watched him and saw Gideon. She saw it in the way he moved, in the economy of his gestures, in the way he looked at the horizon as if expecting something to appear on it. She saw it in his impatience with the ledger, in his inability to sit still while she wrote, in the restless energy that drove him out of the house and into the empty village every morning. He was his father's son, and his father had left, and the valley that had held Ilsa could not hold Daan forever. She knew this. She accepted it. But she continued to write in the ledger, and she continued to read from it to Daan in the evenings, and she continued to teach him the names of the river's moods and the rhythms of the water's year, even though the moods were gone and the rhythms had stopped. She taught him because the knowledge was hers, and because she could not imagine a world in which the Aan did not matter, and because she believed — though the belief was thin and worn, like a stone rubbed smooth by too many hands — that the river would return, and when it did, someone would need to know how to read it.