Chapter 4: The Library Under the River

The library of the river was the biggest room Liyan had ever seen, and nobody had opened it in six hundred years.

It was round, with a glass dome overhead where fish drifted in the green light.

Shelves rose in rings to the ceiling.

Every one of them was packed with scrolls tied with silver cord, and the dust lay thick as flour.

"I wrote them," Mingjue said from the doorway. "Not the words. The records. Each year the river keeps itself, and I copy it down."

"Then why is it dusty?"

"Because after the first five hundred years, I stopped reading what I wrote."

Liyan picked up the nearest scroll.

He could not help it.

It was a flood record, with the date, the water height, the villages hit, and a count of the dead.

He read it twice.

Then he took the brush he always carried in his sleeve and found a clean strip of paper.

"May I measure these?"

"Measure what?"

"The heights. I've kept the water marks at Lower Ferry for six years. I'd like to see how they sit against eleven hundred."

Mingjue looked at him for a moment.

Then he lowered himself to the stone floor beside the reading table, long legs stretched out, his silver hair pooling across the tiles.

He lay back with his hands folded on his stomach, as stiff as a man on a funeral bier.

"Read it aloud," he said. "I would like to hear it."

So Liyan read.

He read the year the Black Water jumped its bank and took three villages.

He read the year of the great wind, and the year of the two moons of rain.

He read the names of towns that no longer existed, in his dry classroom voice.

Now and then he stopped to write a number down.

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