by Kij Johnson
“Yes,” Daell Cabler said from aft.
The rowers said little. At one point Rasali murmured into the deadened air, “To the right,” and Valo and Lan Crosser changed their stroke to avoid a gentle mound a few feet high directly in their path. Mostly the Crossing slid steadily across the regular swells. Unlike his other trips, Kit saw no dark shapes in the mist, large or small. From here they could not see the dock, but the levee ahead was scattered with Farsiders waiting for the work they would do when the ferry landed.
There was nothing he could do to help, so Kit watched Rasali scull in the blazing sun. The work got harder as the rope spooled out until she and the others panted. Shining with sweat, her skin was nearly as bright as the mist in the sunlight, and he wondered how she could bear the light without burning. Her face looked solemn, intent on the eastern shore. Her eyes were alight with reflections from the mist. Then he recognized her expression. It was joy.
How will she bear it, he thought suddenly, when there is no more ferrying to be done? He had known that she loved what she did but he had never realized just how much. He felt as though he had been kicked in the gut. What would it do to her? His bridge would destroy this thing that she loved, that gave her name. How could he not have thought of that? “Rasali,” he said, unable to stay silent.
“Not now,” she said. The rowers panted as they dug in.
“It’s like … pulling through dirt,” Valo gasped.
“Quiet,” Rasali snapped and then they were silent except for their laboring breath. Kit’s own muscles knotted sympathetically. Foot by foot the ferry heaved forward. At some point they were close enough to the Farside upper dock that someone threw a rope to Kit and at last he could do something, however inadequate. He took the rope and pulled. The rowers pushed for their final strokes. The boat slid up beside the dock. People swarmed aboard, securing the boat to the dock, the rope to a temporary anchor on the bank.
Released, the Ferrys and the Crossers embraced, laughing a little dizzily. They walked up the levee toward Farside town and did not look back.
Kit left the ferry to join Jenner Ellar.
It was hard work. The rope’s end had to be brought over an oiled stone saddle on the levee and down to a temporary anchor and capstan at the Farside pillar’s base, a task that involved driving a team of oxen through a temporary gap Jenner had cut into the levee: a risk but one that had to be taken.
More oxen were harnessed to the capstan. Daell Cabler was still pale and shaking from the crossing, but after a glass of something cool and dark, she and her Farside counterparts walked the rope to look for any new weak spots. They found none. Jenner stayed with the capstan. Daell and Kit returned to the temporary saddle in the levee, the notch polished like glass and gleaming with oil.
The rope was released from the dockside anchor. The rope over the saddle whined as it took the load and flattened, and there was a deep pinging noise as it swung out to make a single line down from the saddle, down into the mist. The oxen at the capstan dug in.
The next hours were the tensest of Kit’s life. For a time, the rope did not appear to change. The capstan moaned and clicked, and at last the rope slid by inches, by feet, through the saddle. He could do nothing but watch and rework all the calculations yet again in his mind. He did not see Rasali, but Valo came up after a time to watch the progress. Answering his questions settled Kit’s nerves. The calculations were correct. He had done this before. He was suddenly starved and voraciously ate the food that Valo had brought for him. How long had it been since the broth at The Fish? Hours. Most of a day.
The oxen puffed and grunted and were replaced with new teams. Even lubricated and with leather sleeves, the rope moved reluctantly across the saddle, but it did move. And then the pressure started to ease and the rope paid through the saddle faster. The sun was westering when at last the rope lifted free of the mist. By dusk, the rope was sixty feet above it, stretched humming-tight between the Farside and Nearside levees and the temporary anchors.
Just before dark, Kit saw the flags go up on the signal tower: secure.
Kit worked on and then seconded projects for five years after he left University. His father knew men and women at the higher levels in the Department of Roads, and his old tutor, Skossa Timt, knew more, so many were high-profile works, but he loved all of them, even his first lead, the little toll gate where the boy, Duar, had died.
All public work—drainage schemes, roadwork, amphitheaters, public squares, sewers, alleys and mews—was alchemy. It took the invisible patterns that people made as they lived, and turned them into stone and brick and wood and space. Kit built things that moved people through the intangible architecture that was his mind and his notion—and Empire’s notion—of how their lives could be better.
The first major project he led was a replacement for a collapsed bridge in the Four Peaks region north of Atyar. The original had been a chain suspension bridge but much smaller than the mist bridge would be, crossing only a hundred yards, its pillars only forty feet high. With maintenance, it had survived heavy use for three centuries, shuddering under the carts that brought quicksilver ore down to the smelting village of Oncalion; but after the heavy snowfalls of what was subsequently called the Wolf Winter, one of the gorge’s walls collapsed, taking the north pillar with it and leaving nowhere stable to rebuild. It was easier to start over, two hundred yards upstream.
The people of Oncalion were not genial. Hard work made for hard men and women. There was a grim, desperate edge to their willingness to labor on the bridge, because their livelihood and their lives were dependent on the mine. They had to be stopped at the end of each day or, dangerous as it was, they would work through moonlit nights.
But it was lonely work, even for Kit who did not mind solitude, and when the snows of the first winter brought a halt to construction, he returned with some relief to Atyar to stay with his father. Davell Meinem was old now. His memory was weakening though still strong enough. He spent his days overseeing construction of a vast and fabulous public maze of dry-laid stones brought from all over Empire: his final project, he said to Kit, an accurate prophecy. Skossa Timt had died during the Wolf Winter, but many of Kit’s classmates were still in the capital. Kit spent evenings with them, attended lectures and concerts, entered for the season into a casual relationship with an architect who specialized in waterworks.
Kit returned to the site at Oncalion as soon as the roads cleared. In his absence, through the snows and melt-off, the people of Oncalion had continued to work in the bitter cold, laying course after course of stone. The work had to be redone.
The second summer, they worked every day and moonlit nights and Kit worked beside them.
Kit counted the bridge as a failure although it was coming in barely over budget and only a couple of months late, and no one had died. It was an ugly design; the people of Oncalion had worked hard but joylessly; and there was all his dissatisfaction and guilt about the work that had to be done anew.
Perhaps there was something in the tone of his letters to his father, for there came a day in early autumn that Davell Meinem arrived in Oncalion, riding a sturdy mountain horse and accompanied by a journeyman who vanished immediately into one of the village’s three taverns. It was the middle of the afternoon.
“I want to see this bridge of yours,” Davell said. He looked weary but straight-backed as ever. “Show it to me.”
“We’ll go tomorrow,” Kit said. “You must be tired.”
“Now,” Davell said.
They walked up from the village together. It was a cool day and bright, though the road was overshadowed with pines and fir trees. Basalt outcroppings were stained dark green and black with lichens. His father moved slowly, pausing often for breath. They met a steady trickle of local people leading heavy-laden ponies. The roadbed across the bridge wasn’t quite complete and could not take carts yet, but ponies could cross carrying ore in baskets. Oncalion was already smelting these first small loads.
&nbs
p; At the bridge, Davell asked the same questions he had asked when Kit was a child playing on his work sites. Kit found himself responding as he had so many years before, eager to explain—or excuse—each decision; and always, always the ponies passing.
They walked down to the older site. The pillar had been gutted for stones so all that was left was rubble, but it gave them a good view of the new bridge: the boxy pillars, the curve of the main chains, the thick vertical suspender chains, the slight sprung arch of the bulky roadbed. It looked as clumsy as a suspension bridge could. Yet another pony crossed, led by a woman singing something in the local dialect.
“It’s a good bridge,” Davell said.
Kit shook his head. His father, who had been known for his sharp tongue on the work sites though never to his son, said, “A bridge is a means to an end. It only matters because of what it does. Leads from here to there. If you do your work right they won’t notice it, any more than you notice where quicksilver comes from, most times. It’s a good bridge because they are already using it. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Kit.”
It was a big party that night. The Farsiders (and, Kit knew, the Nearsiders) drank and danced under the shadow of their bridge-to-be. Torchlight and firelight touched the stones of the tower base and anchorage, giving them mass and meaning, but above their light the tower was a black outline, the absence of stars. Torches ringed the tower’s parapet; they seemed no more than gold stars among the colder ones.
Kit walked among them. Everyone smiled or waved and offered to stand him drinks but no one spoke much with him. It was as though the lifting of the cable had separated him from them. The immense towers had not done this; he had still been one of them to some degree at least—the instigator of great labors but still, one of them. But now, for tonight anyway, he was the man who bridged the mist. He had not felt so lonely since his first day here. Even Loreh Tanner’s death had not severed him so completely from their world.
On every project, there was a day like this. It was possible that the distance came from him, he realized suddenly. He came to a place and built something, passing through the lives of people for a few months or years. And then he left. A road through dangerous terrain or a bridge across mist saved lives and increased trade, but it changed the world as well. It was his job to make a thing and then leave to make the next one—but it was also his preference, not to remain and see what he had done. What would Nearside and Farside look like in ten years, in fifty? He had never returned to a previous site.
It was harder this time or perhaps just different. Perhaps he was different. He was staying longer this time because of the size of the project, and he had allowed himself to love the country on either side of the bridge. To have more was to have more to miss when he eventually left.
Rasali—what would her life look like?
Valo danced by, his arm around a woman half a head taller than he—Rica Bridger—and Kit caught his arm. “Where is Rasali?” he shouted, then knowing he could not be heard over the noise of drums and pipes, he mouthed Rasali. He didn’t hear what Valo said but followed his pointing hand.
Rasali was alone, flat on her back on the river side of the levee, looking up. There were no moons, so the Sky Mist hung close overhead, a river of stars that poured east to west. Kit knelt a few feet away. “Rasali Ferry of Farside.”
Her teeth flashed in the dark. “Kit Meinem of Atyar.”
He lay beside her. The grass was like bad straw, coarse against his back and neck. Without looking at him she passed a jar of something. Its taste was strong as tar and Kit gasped for a moment.
“I did not mean… .” he started but trailed off, unsure how to continue.
“Yes,” she said and he knew she had heard the words he didn’t say. Her voice contained a shrug. “Many people born into a Ferry family never cross the mist.”
“But you—” He stopped, felt carefully for his words. “Maybe others don’t but you do. And I think maybe you must do so.”
“Just as you must build,” she said softly. “That’s clever of you to realize that.”
“And there will be no need after this, will there? Not on boats anyway. We’ll still need fishskin, so the fishers will still go out, but they—”
“—stay close to shore,” she said.
“And you?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Kit. Days come, days go. I go onto the mist or I don’t. I live or I don’t. There is no certainty but there never is.”
“It doesn’t distress you?”
“Of course it does. I love and I hate this bridge of yours. I will pine for the mist, for the need to cross it. But I do not want to be part of a family that all die young without even a corpse for the burning. If I have a child she will not need to make the decision I did: to cross the mist and die, or to stay safe on one side of the world and never see the other. She will lose something. She will gain something else.”
“Do you hate me?” he said finally, afraid of the answer, afraid of any answer she might give.
“No. Oh, no.” She rolled over to him and kissed his mouth, and Kit could not say if the salt he tasted was from her tears or his own.
The autumn was spent getting the chains across the river. In the days after the crossing, the rope was linked to another and pulled back the way it had come, coupled now; and then there were two ropes in parallel courses. It was tricky work, requiring careful communications via the signal towers, but it was completed without event, and Kit could at last get a good night’s sleep. To break the rope would have been to start anew with the long difficult crossing. Over the next days, each rope was replaced with fishskin cable strong enough to take the weight of the chains until they were secured.
The cables were hoisted to the tops of the pillars, to prefigure the path one of the eight chains would take: secured with heavy pins set in protected slots in the anchorages, making straight sharp lines to the saddles on the pillars and then, two hundred feet above the mist, the long perfect catenary. A catwalk was suspended from the cables. For the first time, people could cross the mist without the boats, though few chose to do so, except for the high workers from the capital and the coast: a hundred men and women so strong and graceful that they seemed another species and kept mostly to themselves. They were directed by a woman Kit had worked with before, Feinlin. The high-workers took no surnames. Something about Feinlin reminded him of Rasali.
The weather grew colder and the days shorter, and Kit pushed hard to have the first two chains across before the winter rains began. There would be no heavy work once the ground got too wet to give sturdy purchase to the teams. Calculations to the contrary, Kit could not quite trust that cables, even fishskin cables, would survive the weight of those immense arcs through an entire winter—or that a Big One would not take one down in the unthinking throes of some great storm.
The eyebars that would make up the chain were ten feet long and required considerable manhandling to be linked with bolts larger than a man’s forearm. The links became a chain, even more cumbersome. Winches pulled the chain’s end up to the saddles and out onto the catwalk.
After this, the work became even more difficult and painstaking. Feinlin and her people moved individual eyebars and pins out onto the catwalks and joined them in place; a backbreaking dangerous task that had to be exactly synchronized with the work on the other side of the river so that the cable would not be stressed.
Most nights Kit worked into the darkness. When the moons were bright enough, he, the high-workers, and the bridgewrights would work in shifts, day and night.
He crossed the mist six more times that fall. The high-workers disliked having people on the catwalks but he was the architect, after all, so he crossed once that way, struggling with vertigo. After that he preferred the ferries. When he crossed with Valo, they talked exclusively about the bridge—Valo had decided to stay until the bridge was complete and the ferries finished, though his mind was already full of the capital—but the other times, when it was Rasali,
they were silent, listening to the hiss of the V-shaped scull moving in the mist. His fear of the mist decreased with each day they came closer to the bridge’s completion, though he couldn’t say why this was.
When Kit did not work through the night and Rasali was on the same side of the mist, they spent their nights together, sometimes making love, at other times content to share drinks or play ninepins in The Deer’s Hart’s garden. Kit’s proficiency surprised everyone but himself—he had been famous for his accuracy, back in Atyar. He and Rasali did not talk again about what she would do when the bridge was complete, or what he would do, for that matter.
The hard work was worth it. It was still warm enough that the iron didn’t freeze the high-worker’s hands on the day they placed the final bolt. The first chain was complete.
Though work was slow through the winter, it was a mild one, and the second and third chains were in place by spring. The others were completed by the end of the summer.
With the heavy work done, some of the workers returned to their home-places. More than half had taken the name Bridger or something similar. “We have changed things,” Kit said to Jenner on one of his Nearside visits, just before Jenner left for his new work. “No,” Jenner said: “You have changed things.” Kit did not respond but held this close and thought of it sometimes with mingled pride and fear.
The workers who remained were all high-workers, people who did not mind crawling about on the suspension chains securing the support ropes. For the past two years, the ropemakers for hundreds of miles up- and downstream had been twisting, cabling, looping, and reweaving the fishskin cables that would support the road deck. Crates, each marked with the suspender’s position in the bridge, stood in carefully sorted towers in the old sheep field.
Kit’s work was now all paperwork, it seemed—so many invoices, so many reports for the capital—but he managed every day to watch the high-workers. Sometimes he climbed to the tops of the pillars and looked down into the mist and saw Rasali’s or Valo’s ferry, an shape like an open eye half-hidden in tendrils of blazing white or pale gray.