Where Spans Converge

Eiran Vale preferred to speak in joints and grain. He told his neighbors nothing important with his mouth; he told them everything with a shave of a chamfer, the angle at which a beam accepted a wedge, the tautness of a lash. Early that afternoon he tightened the last toggle on a market crossing and stepped back to watch how the repaired arc breathed under the footfall. The cables made a dim, satisfying whine like a kettle settling; the merchants below resumed their hawking as if the span had merely been a sundered chair that someone had finally mended.

He worked with tools that had names only he used — a clamp he called the patient, a little iron bar that he winked at and pretended it answered back. His hands were broad and quick and stained with resin; his nails were clean because he kept a small brush and scrubbed them like one might tend a bonsai. There was humor in his solitude. When a baker scolded him for hair in the pastry he replied, 'I'll accept complaints about the weave of a rope, not the seasoning of your buns,' and the man grinned as though Eiran had offered a sensible bargain. He was not without companions: the market's noise kept him company, gulls argued with one another above the river, and a cart-wheel loose from someone else's misfortune sang a single off-key note across the square.

A child wandered onto the span as if the repaired wood were a promise. The kid's sandals clicked, then halted, then began to turn like a confused compass. Eiran heard the little intake of air that people make when balance decides to change sides. He moved without fuss. He stepped forward, planted his boot against the beam, and reached with a practiced curve of fingers to hook the child's elbow and tilt the small weight away from danger. He steadied the child as if he were fitting a delicate spline into place. 'Don't show off with other people's toes,' he murmured. The child glared at him, indignant in the way only children can be when rescued, and the child's mother stuck her head out of her stall and called, 'He always does that, Eiran. Thinks the world needs him to be a handrail.'

He smiled and adjusted the last lash on the repair, testing the tension with his palms. 'Tea will hold a person better than a rail, if you let it,' he said, half to the mother, half to himself. People laughed; laughter rolls through the market like a clean breeze, and for a moment Eiran accepted the warmth of it. He climbed down to check his knotwork and found the span's anchor stones cold to the touch and blackened at the joints by the river's breath. Nothing so dramatic to mark the night, only the usual scrapes where carts had braked too late and the small stick of a vend woman's broom leaning where it had been dropped.

He tightened a bolt, readjusted a shim, and wrapped the splice in tarpaper. He finished with a little flourish and a grunt, because pride is a thing craftsmen swallow and hiccup out later in unguarded moments. As he packed his tools and wound the last coil of spare rope around his arm, the first tremor came — a whisper at the soles of his feet that made the kettle-whine of the span pause, as if the arc were holding its breath.