The Long Rain
The shrine had stood on the road for longer than the road had been a road.
Nobody remembered the god it was built for. The stone had the soft, eaten look of something that had been holy a long time ago and was now mostly weather. A ring of pillars, a low roof, a floor of flat stones laid by hands that were dust before any kingdom now standing had a name. Travelers used it. The god, whoever he had been, didn’t seem to mind.
Kuon reached it just as the rain turned mean.
He shook the water from his hood — a quick, full-body shake, the way his kind shed rain — and stepped under the roof, and the rain followed him in as far as the third pillar before giving up. He set his pack down. He sat. He listened to the world hiss.
He was not the first to take shelter.
A merchant was already there, two of his mules tied at the far pillar and the third — older, lame in one foot — lying down on the dry stone like a dog. The merchant was a thin man with a thin coat and the kind of mustache that had been ambitious in his youth and was now embarrassed. He nodded at Kuon — at the dark green of him, the wide soft mouth, the wet cloak that did not quite hide what was under it — and after a small considering pause he nodded again, and that was that. In the Lantern World there were stranger things on the road than a marsh man in a hood.
Kuon nodded back.
Neither spoke. It was not that kind of rain.
A soldier came in soon after. He was younger than Kuon expected. They were always younger than Kuon expected. His armor was good once and was not good now; a piece of his pauldron was missing, and the leather under it was dark with something that had not washed out in any river. He sat with his back to a pillar and closed his eyes, and Kuon understood that he was not asleep but had simply chosen not to look at any of them for a while.
The mother came last. She had a child in a sling, and the child was very small, and very awake, and did not cry. She was perhaps twenty. She was perhaps forty. Hunger does that to a face. She thanked the merchant for nothing in particular when she sat down, and the merchant said of course and meant it.
Kuon took a small kettle from his pack.
He filled it with rainwater from the edge of the roof, where it fell in a clean sheet, and he set it on a flat stone, and he pressed two long damp fingers under the stone and warmed it. The kettle began to sing almost at once. The merchant watched him do this and said nothing. In the Lantern World there were a great many small magics, and a man who could warm a stone for a kettle was a useful thing to share a roof with, and not, in the end, a remarkable thing.
“Tea,” Kuon said, when the kettle was ready. “If anyone wants.”
The mother wanted. The merchant wanted. The soldier opened one eye, considered it, and wanted.
Kuon poured.
Some miles to the west, in a place where the rain was heavier and the trees older, Quinn was killing something.
She did not have a name for it. She had a name for the kind of thing it was — she had several names, in several languages most of which were no longer spoken — but the thing itself was new tonight. It had been born this evening. It would not see morning.
It was tall. It moved like water moves when something has died upstream. It had been walking east, toward the road, toward the shrine, toward the small bright human lights it could feel from a great distance, the way a hungry man feels bread. Quinn had stepped out of the dark in front of it and said something quiet. The thing had stopped. Then it had decided not to stop, and that had been its mistake.
She was the size of a sparrow.
She was, at the moment, drinking.
When she was finished she sat for a while on the wet ground, breathing, and she watched the rain wash what was left of the thing back into the soil. She was tired. She had not been tired in a long time, and she did not like the feeling of remembering it. She licked the last of the dark from her teeth and turned her small face east, toward the road, toward the shrine, toward the small bright human light that was Kuon.
Something is wrong, she thought. Something is wrong tonight.
She had felt it crack open while she was fighting. Far away. Very far. A sound under the world, the way an old beam in a house gives a single quiet groan in the middle of the night and tells you, without telling you, that the house will not stand another winter.
She stretched her wings — one of them was torn now, at the edge, and would need attention — and she launched herself into the rain, and flew.
“My boy is in the war,” the merchant said.
He had not meant to say it. The tea had loosened something in him. He looked into his cup and went on as if it had asked him a question.
“He writes when he can. He cannot write often. The last letter said they were moving south to the line at Erien. That was — ” he counted on his fingers, lost count, started again — “that was a season ago. Two seasons. I am not sure.”
“Erien held,” the soldier said, without opening his eyes.
The merchant looked up.
“Erien held,” the soldier said again. “I was there. We held it. We are still holding it. Your boy is alive unless he is unlucky, and most boys are not unlucky. Most boys are only ordinarily lucky, which is enough.”
The merchant’s mouth did a small complicated thing and then settled.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t,” the soldier said.
The mother shifted the child in her sling and the child made a soft sound and was still again. She had not spoken since she came in. Now she did.
“Is there a war everywhere,” she said, “or only here?”
The soldier opened his eyes.
He looked at her for a long moment. Kuon watched him do it. He saw the soldier choose, in that long moment, not to lie.
“Everywhere I have walked,” the soldier said. “I have not walked far.”
The mother nodded as if she had expected this answer. She looked down at the child. The child was looking up at her with the calm, depthless attention of a thing too young to be afraid.
“My village,” the mother said, to no one, “is not there anymore.”
Nobody asked her what had taken it. There were a great many things, in the Lantern World, that took villages. To ask was to make her name one, and she had clearly decided, on the road, not to name it. Kuon refilled her cup. She held it in both hands and did not drink.
The rain went on.
After a time the soldier asked, in the way men ask when they are too tired to be embarrassed, if anyone had a story.
The merchant did not. The mother did not. The soldier himself certainly did not; he had asked because he wanted to receive one, the way a man holds out a cup. They all looked, without quite meaning to, at Kuon.
Kuon looked into his tea.
He had not told a story in a long time. On Earth he had told a great many, and nobody had wanted them, and at some point he had decided that the wanting was the part that hurt, and had stopped. He had been in the Lantern World for — he did not, in fact, know how long. Long enough that the number had stopped mattering. Long enough that the man who had wanted to be read was a small soft thing he carried in a pocket and rarely took out.
He took it out now.
“There was a frog,” he said, “who lived in a pond at the edge of a village. The village was very small and the pond was very small and the frog was, by frog standards, ordinary. He sang at night. The villagers, when they could not sleep, listened to him sing, and were comforted, because a frog singing is the sound of a place that is alive.”
The child in the sling turned its head toward his voice.
“One winter,” Kuon said, “the pond froze. The frog slept under the ice, the way frogs do. And in the spring, when the ice melted, the villagers came down to the pond and waited for him to sing. He did not sing. They waited a day, and a week, and a season. He never sang again.”
The mother was watching him now.
“They thought he had died,” Kuon said. “They were sad about it for a while, the way you are sad about small things, and then they forgot, the way you forget. The pond was quiet for a hundred years. The village grew. The village shrank. The village ended. The pond stayed.”
He paused.
“One night, a traveler camped beside the pond. He could not sleep. He was a tired man and he had walked a long way and the silence of the place pressed on him like a hand. And in the deep middle of the night, when he had given up on sleep entirely, he heard, from under the water, very faint and very far, a frog begin to sing.”
He stopped.
The merchant, after a moment, said, “And?”
“And nothing,” Kuon said. “He listened. In the morning he went on.”
The soldier was looking at him with the expression of a man who has been struck very lightly and is deciding whether it counted.
“That isn’t a story,” the merchant said, but gently.
“No,” Kuon agreed. “It isn’t.”
The mother, very quietly, was crying. Not for the story. For something the story had touched on the way to somewhere else. The child reached up and put a small hand against her face and she laughed once, wetly, and bent her head to it.
Kuon looked back into his tea.
Stop, he told himself, with great kindness. That is enough of that.
The rain stopped near dawn.
The merchant left first, with his mules. The soldier left soon after, walking east, and as he passed Kuon he stopped, and seemed about to say something, and did not, and went on. The mother stayed longest. She let the child sleep. When she finally rose, Kuon gave her what bread he had, and a small folded paper of dried leaves for tea, and she took them without protest, which is how he knew she had needed them.
She paused at the edge of the shrine.
“Thank you,” she said, “for the story.”
“It wasn’t a very good one,” Kuon said.
“No,” she said, and almost smiled, “it wasn’t.”
She walked into the wet morning and was gone.
Kuon sat alone for a while.
The shrine was very quiet. The ring of pillars held the dawn the way a cup holds water. He did not move. He was thinking, in the loose drifting way that comes after rain, about the frog and the pond and the hundred years, and about the man who had taught him that story, who had been his father, who had been dead now for what was, by any honest count, a very long time.
Something small and wet and irritable landed on his shoulder — a bat, no bigger than a sparrow, with one torn wing and the affronted expression of a creature who had recently been a queen.
“You made the woman cry,” Quinn said.
“She wanted to cry,” Kuon said. “I gave her an excuse.”
“That is what bad men say.”
“Is that so?”
Quinn climbed down his arm and onto the back of his hand, where she sat, dripping, and glared up at him with the dignity of something very old that had recently been rained on. Her wing was torn at the edge. She was missing a piece of one ear. She smelled, very faintly, of something that was not blood and not smoke.
He looked at the ear.
“Bad night?”
“Ordinary night.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I am dignified.”
“You’re bleeding dignifiedly.”
She bared her small teeth at him. He poured the last of the tea into the kettle’s lid and set it down for her, and she stalked over to it and drank, and after a moment she said, without looking up:
“Something opened tonight. Far away. West, I think. Maybe further.”
“I felt it.”
“I thought you might have.”
“A god?”
She did not answer at once. She finished the tea. She sat back on her haunches, looked east, looked west, looked up.
“Look,” she said.
He looked.
The sky in the west was clearing. The last clouds were tearing apart, and beyond them the dawn stars were going out one by one as the morning came, the way dawn stars do, all of them at once, all of them the same way.
All but one.
There was a star low in the western sky that was not going out the way the others were. It was going out wrongly. It was going out the way a candle goes out when someone has put a thumb to the wick. It dimmed. It guttered. It dimmed again. And while Kuon watched, very calmly, with the tea cooling in his hand, it went black, and stayed black, and the place where it had been was a small hole in the morning that the morning did not know how to fill.
Quinn was very still on his hand.
“Whose was it?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“You always know.”
“I don’t know this one.”
She looked at him. He was still watching the place where the star had been. His face was the face he wore when he was sad about something he had expected to be sad about eventually, and had hoped, foolishly, would take longer.
“Someone,” he said, “is going to have a very bad dream tonight.”
Quinn climbed slowly up his sleeve and into the inside of his hood, where it was dry and dark and smelled like him, and she did not say anything else.
After a while Kuon picked up his pack.
He walked east, into the morning, under a sky with one small new hole in it.
Far to the east, across a sea Kuon had never crossed and a country whose name he did not yet know, in a stone room high in a majestic city in a church older than the kingdom that housed it, a girl named Iyra sat up in her narrow bed with both hands pressed to her mouth.
She was crying.
She did not know why.