Chapter 4: Rescues

The carter came that night, just as Mei had known he would.

He came down the north landing a little after the first watch, a big slope-shouldered man in a wet sheepskin, with his whip still in his hand and mud from the east ford up to his knees, and stood on the bottom step looking at the ferry lamp as though it were the only light left in the world. Water ran off him and pooled on the stone, and he waited to be spoken to, as the new ones often did.

The Recorder and her husband had gone back upriver on the evening boat, the Recorder green again. Before she left she had said, If anything happens that isn't on a form, ask for me at the City God Temple in Anping. Then, low, so that only Mei heard: He'll try to save you. They always do, the bound ones. Mei hadn't known what to say to that. She still didn't.

She went to the bow to take the carter's fare, and the prince was already there, standing on the end of the ferry in his too-short jacket and looking down at the man on the steps. The lamp was behind him. She couldn't see his face, only the set of his shoulders, and his hands, which were closed.

"Half fare," Mei began, from long habit, and heard herself, and stopped. "I mean. You don't have to... I'm sorry."

The carter looked at her. Then at the prince. His big wet face was puzzled, as they were at first, as if he'd lost something and couldn't remember what.

"I haven't got any money," he said. "It was in the cart."

"Then you..."

"Here," said the prince.

He held out his hand. There was something in his palm. It caught the lamplight and broke it into colors, the way oil does on water, and Mei leaned closer and saw that it was a single scale, as big as her thumbnail, pearl-white and shining. There was a little raw patch on the side of his wrist where it had come from.

"For the ferryman below," said the prince to the carter, in his deep lake-bottom voice. "Give it to whoever asks for your fare at the red door. They'll take it."

"That's worth a lot more than half," said Mei, before she could stop herself, and then wished she hadn't.

The carter didn't seem to hear. The balanced ones didn't wait in the water, the Recorder had told her before she left; the river had taken them for the books, not for itself, so it had no claim on them. He could go straight up the hill tonight. Mei didn't know whether that was better or worse.

He took the scale. He turned it over in his muddy fingers. Then he looked up at the prince, as if he could see something in his face that Mei couldn't from where she stood.

"Thank you, sir," he said.

"Don't," said the prince, and turned his back, and went and sat in the bow with his arms folded, and spoke to no one all the way across the water.

She didn't sleep much that night. The black arrow was in the cabin with her, wrapped in a rag under the bedroll, because an arrow that good was worth four coppers to anyone with a bow and she didn't throw away four coppers. She hadn't looked at it since.

"Fish," she said into the dark.

Nothing from the bow. Then: "What."

"When you save me. For real. Does somebody else go in instead? Like the carter?"

He took so long she thought he wasn't going to answer.

"Only if you were written," he said. "Only the written ones have to be balanced. You aren't written. You're a ferrywoman."

"How do you know?"

"Because nobody," said the prince, "writes down ferrywomen."

She lay and listened to the water against the hull until the cocks started up on the north bank, and then she got up and went to see about her eel trap.

The first rescue was on the morning of the seventeenth.

Mei was in the shallows off the south bank, up to her thighs in brown water, feeling along the bottom for the stake of the eel trap she'd set two days before and thinking about eels, and whether the herbalist would trade a plaster for one. She bent down and put both arms in to the shoulder.

Something grabbed her round the waist and lifted her clean out of the lake.

She shrieked. She hung in the air with water pouring off her and a long hard arm locked round her middle like a mooring chain, and then she was being carried, at speed, up the bank, and dumped on the grass.

She sat up, spitting. The prince stood over her, soaked to the chest, breathing hard.

"I," said Mei, through her teeth, "was standing up."

"You went under."

"I bent down. To get the eel trap. In water up to my knees."

"Your head went under."

"Because I bent down." She got up, wet from the neck down, with a reed stuck to her cheek. "Do you know what eels are worth this time of year? And now I've lost the stake and I'll never find it again in this mud, and..."

"It didn't work," said the prince, looking down at his own hands.

"Of course nothing happened! I wasn't dying! I was fishing!"

He looked up. For one instant, under the ice, she saw him hope. Then he folded his arms. "Then stop," he said, "doing things that look like dying."

The second rescue was on the eighteenth, and it was worse.

A squall came down off the hills in the middle of the afternoon, as they did in the third month, all at once out of a clear sky. Mei was halfway across with a full load: two farmers, a woman with three hens in a basket, and Auntie Tang's nephew with a sack of rice. The wind hit the ferry broadside and the rain came down in gray ropes and the lake got up into short steep waves that slapped over the side.

A squall, nothing more, and Mei had crossed in a hundred of them. She braced her feet and leaned on the pole and turned the ferry's nose into the wind and shouted at the farmers to sit in the middle and stop moving, and the hens screamed, and she was starting to enjoy herself, which she always did a little in a squall, when she saw the prince stand up in the bow looking terribly, dangerously helpful.

"Sit down!" she yelled.

He didn't sit down. He lifted one hand, palm out toward the open lake, and closed his eyes, and the water out there flattened.

Then it rose.

It came up out of the lake in a long gray ridge, smooth as a slope of glass, taller than the ferry. It came toward them, unhurried, and Mei understood with perfect clarity what it was for. It was going to lift the ferry and carry it gently and safely all the way to the landing, out of the storm. It was a beautiful wave. It was a prince's wave.

It hit the ferry broadside and turned it over.

They all got out. Nobody drowned. The water at the landing was only chest-deep, and the farmers waded ashore swearing, and Auntie Tang's nephew came up with the sack of rice still in his arms, and the woman with the hens stood on the steps holding an empty basket and screaming at the sky. One of the hens was in the willow. One was on Auntie Tang's roof. One was never seen again.

The ferry lay upside down in the shallows with its flat brown belly to the rain, like a dead turtle.

Mei stood beside it in water up to her waist. The squall had gone as fast as it came, and the sun was coming out over the hills. Her hair was in her face and her jacket was stuck to her and she was staring at her boat. The prince stood beside her, staring at it too.

"That," he said, after a long time, "was not what I intended."

Mei wrung out her braid.

"The wave was meant to carry it. Gently." He made a small shaping motion with one hand, and then stopped, and put the hand down. "I haven't done waves in a while. In the palace there are people who do the waves."

She waded to the stern of her overturned ferry, felt along under the edge of it, and found the lamp pole. The brass lamp was still on it, upside down, under the water. She pulled it out. Water ran out of the horn shade. The wick was drowned.

The prince was watching the lamp with his hands pressed flat against his thighs.

"Well?" said Mei.

"I felt it," he said. "When it went under. Like a hand round my wrist, letting go one finger at a time." He breathed out. "I'm standing next to you. I think that's enough. I'd rather you didn't test it."

Then she waded ashore and sat down on the bottom step of the landing with the dripping lamp in her lap and put her face in her hands, and laughed until she had to hold her ribs.

The third rescue was on the evening of the nineteenth, when the ferry had been turned right side up again and bailed out and dried in the sun, and Mei had lit the lamp with a new wick that cost her two coppers, which she had written down. The water on the post had come up over the third line. She hadn't written that down.

A boatman came to cross. A big man from upriver, with a red face and a belly and a wine jar under his arm, and he didn't like the price. He said so. He said it loudly, standing on the landing with the jar, and Mei said it loudly back, because she'd been saying it loudly back to boatmen since she was twelve and she was good at it. And the boatman, who was drunk, reached out and took hold of her arm to make his point.

It wasn't anything. Men took hold of her arm on that landing every week. She was about to twist out of his grip and step on his foot, as her mother had taught her.

The prince threw him in the lake.

He didn't seem to move. One moment the boatman was holding her arm and shouting about robbery, and the next the boatman was in the air, wine jar and all, describing a long astonished arc over the ferry, and then he was in the water ten paces out, coming up spluttering and roaring, and the wine jar was floating away on the current.

The prince stood on the landing with his hands at his sides. Scales had come up all along his throat and down the backs of his hands, white and shining in the lamplight, and the air round him had the chill of deep water.

"He touched you," he said.

"He was a customer!"

"He was hurting you."

"He was drunk. He'd have paid! He always pays in the end, he's been crossing here for ten years, he's my best customer on the upriver run!" She threw out her arm at the lake, where the boatman was wading ashore in the shallows, shouting things that made the egg woman cover her son's ears. "Now he'll go round by the east ford! He'll tell everyone! That's two coppers a week for the rest of my life!"

The prince stared at her. The chill went out of the air.

"Two coppers," he said.

"A week."

"You value your own arm at two coppers a week."

"I value my business at two coppers a week! My arm's fine!" She held it up. "Look! It's an arm! It's still on!"

He studied her arm, then her face, with such an odd expression that she lowered the arm and stopped shouting and stood there in the lamplight feeling foolish without knowing why.

"You'd have let him break it," said the prince slowly. "For two coppers a week."

"He wasn't going to break it!"

"You didn't know that." He was still looking at her. "You'd already done the sum."

Mei opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

She shut it again, turned round and went down the steps to the ferry, and stood in the stern with her hand on the lamp pole, not looking at him.

"The boat," she said, to the water. "When you turned it over. The patch on the left side split. And the oarlock. And the new wick was two coppers. And the hen."

"The hen?"

"The one that was never seen again. Her owner wants forty coppers." Mei turned round. "You owe me for the boat, Fish."

He stood on the landing in his ridiculous jacket with the lamplight on his face.

"I haven't got any money," he said.

"Then you'll work it off," said Mei, and threw him the pole.