“You never come up to the work sites on either side,” Kit said suddenly after a comfortable, slightly drunken silence. He inspected his earthenware mug, empty now except for the smell of yeast.
Rasali had given up on the benches and sat instead on one of the garden tables. She leaned back until she lay supine, face toward the sky. “I’ve been busy, perhaps you noticed?”
“It’s more than that. Everyone finds time here and there. And you used to.”
“I did, didn’t I? I just haven’t seen the point lately. The bridge changes everything but I don’t see yet how it changes me. So I wait until it’s time. Perhaps it’s like the mist.”
“What about now?”
She rolled her head until her cheek lay against the rough wood of the tabletop: looking at him, he could tell, though her eyes were hidden in shadows. What did she see, he wondered. What was she hoping to see? It pleased him but made him nervous.
“Come to the tower now, tonight,” he said. “Soon everything changes. We pull the ropes across and make the chains and hang the supports and lay the road. It stops being a project and becomes a bridge, a road. But tonight it’s still just two towers and some plans. Rasali, climb it with me. I can’t describe what it’s like up there—the wind, the sky all around you, the river below.” He flushed at the urgency in his voice. When she remained silent he added, “You change whether you wait for it or not.”
“There’s lightning,” she said.
“It runs from cloud to cloud,” he said. “Not to earth.”
“Heat lightning.” She sat up. “So show me this place.”
The work site was abandoned. The sky overhead had filled with clouds lit from within by the lightning, which was worse than no light at all since it ruined their night vision. They staggered across the site, trying to plan their paths in the moments of light, doggedly moving through the darkness. “Shit,” Rasali said suddenly in the darkness, then: “Tripped over something or other. Ghost sheep.” Kit found himself laughing.
They took the internal stairs instead of the scaffold. Kit knew them thoroughly, knew every irregular turn and riser, so he counted them aloud to Rasali as he led her by the hand. They reached one hundred and ninety-four before they saw light from a flash of lightning overhead, two hundred and eighteen when they finally stepped onto the roof, panting for air.
They were not alone. A woman gasped; she and the man with her bolted down the stairs, laughing. Rasali said with satisfaction, “Sera Oakfield. I’d recognize that laugh anywhere. Then that was Erno Bridgeman with her.”
“He took his name from the bridge?” Kit asked but Rasali said only, “Oh,” in a child’s voice. Silent lightning painted the sky over her head in sudden strokes of purple-white, shot through what seemed a dozen layers of cloud, an incomprehensible complexity of light and shadow.
“The sky is so much closer.” She walked to the edge and looked down at Nearside. Dull gold light poured from doors open to the heavy air. Kit stayed where he was, content to watch her. The light—when there was light—was shadowless and her face looked young and full of wonder. After a time she came to him.
They said nothing, only kissed and then made love in a nest of their discarded clothes. Kit felt the stone of his bridge against his knees, his back. It was still warm as skin from the day’s heat, but not as warm as Rasali. She was softer than the rocks and tasted sweet.
A feeling he could not have described cracked open his chest, his throat, his belly. It had been a long time since he had had sex, not met his own needs. He had nearly forgotten the delight of it, the sharp rising shock of his coming, the rocking ocean of hers. Even their awkwardness pleased him, because it held in it the possibility of doing this again, and better.
When they were done they talked. “You know my goal, to build this bridge.” Kit looked down at her face, there and gone in the flickering of the lightning. “But I do not know yours.”
Rasali laughed softly. “Yet you have seen me succeed a thousand times, and fail a few. I wish to live well.”
“That’s not a goal,” Kit said.
“Why? Because it’s not yours? Which is better, Kit Meinem of Atyar? A single great victory or a thousand small ones?” And then: “Tomorrow,” Rasali said. “We will take the rope across tomorrow.”
“You’re sure?” Kit asked.
“That’s a strange statement coming from you. The bridge is all about crossing being a certainty, yes? Like the sun coming up each morning? We agreed this afternoon. It’s time.”
Dawn came early with the innkeeper’s rap on the door. Kit woke disoriented, tangled in the sheets of his little cupboard bed. After he and Rasali had come down from the pillar, Rasali to sleep and Kit to do everything that needed to happen before the rope was brought across, all in the few hours remaining to the night. His skin smelled of Rasali but he was stunned with lack of sleep, and had trouble believing the sex had been real. But there was stone dust ground into his palms. He smiled and, though it was high summer, sang a spring song from Atyar as he quickly washed and dressed. He drank a bowl filled with broth in the taproom. It was tangy, lukewarm. A single small perch stared up at him from a salted eye. Kit left the fish, and left the inn.
The clouds and the lightning were gone. Early as it was the sky was already pale and hot. The news was everywhere and the entire town, or so it seemed, drifted with Kit to the work site, flowed over the levee, and settled onto the bank.
The river was a blinding creamy ribbon, looking as it had the first time he had seen it; and for a minute he felt dislocated in time. High mist was seen as a good omen and though he did not believe in omens he was nevertheless glad. The signal towers’ flags hung limp against the hot blue-white sky.
Kit walked down to Rasali’s boat, nearly hidden in its own tight circle of people. As Kit approached, Valo called, “Hey, Kit!” Rasali looked up. Her smile was like welcome shade on a bright day. The circle opened to accept him.
“Greetings, Valo Ferry of Farside, Rasali Ferry of Farside,” he said. When he was close enough, he clasped Rasali’s hands in his own, loving their warmth despite the day’s heat.
“Kit.” She kissed his mouth to a handful of muffled hoots and cheers from the bystanders and a surprised noise from Valo. She tasted like chicory.
Daell Cabler nodded absently to Kit. She was the lead ropemaker. She, her husband Stivvan, and the journeymen and masters they had summoned were inspecting the hundreds of fathoms of twisted fishskin cord, loading them without kinks onto spools three feet across and loading those onto a wooden frame bolted to The Tranquil Crossing.
The rope was thin, not much more than a cord, narrower than Kit’s smallest finger. It looked fragile, and nothing like strong enough to carry its own weight for a quarter of a mile. The tests said otherwise.
Several of the stronger people from the bridge handed down small heavy crates to Valo and Chell Crosser, in the bow. Silverwork from Hedeclin and copper in bricks: the ferry was to be weighted somewhat forward, which would make the first part of the crossing more difficult but should help by the end, as the cord paid out and took on weight from the mist.
“—We think, anyway,” Valo had said, two months back when he and Rasali had discussed the plan with Kit. “But we don’t know. No one’s done this before.” Kit had nodded and not for the first time wished that the river had been a little less broad. Upriver perhaps—but no, this had been the only option. He did write to an old classmate back in Atyar, a man who now taught the calculus, and presented their solution. His friend had written back to say that it looked as though it ought to work, but that he knew little of mist.