Then it was farewell to Mama on the last evening and a long night listening to Papa cry in the night, and very early on the morning of the fifth, before it was light, he and red-eyed Papa were on the road once more, back to Sendoph, Mouche carrying only a little bag with his books inside, and Duster’s collar, and the picture of a sailing ship he had drawn at school. Papa didn’t have to put his veils on until they were far down the road, and he spent most of the time until then wiping his eyes.
When they came to House Genevois, Mouche asked, in a kind of panic, “Can we walk down to the river, Papa?”
His papa gave him a sideways tilt of the head, but he walked on past House Genevois, down Bridge Street past the courtyard entrance, on to the corner where one of the little green-patinaed copper-domed towers topped the wall above the riverbank, and thence out over the stone arches of Brewer’s Bridge itself while the invisible people moved back and forth like little mud-colored rivers running in all directions, their flow breaking around the human pedestrians without touching them, those pedestrians looking over the heads of the invisibles and never lowering their gaze. The breweries stood across the water, four of them, and on the nearest stubby tower a weathervane shifted and glittered, its head pointing north, toward the sea.
The river was low and sullen in this season, dark with ash from the firemounts to the south and east, with the islets of gray foam slipping past so slowly it was hard to believe they were moving at all. Between the water mills, the banks were thickly bristled with reed beds, green and aswarm with birdy-things, and far down the river a smoke plume rose where a wood burning sternwheel steamboat made its slow way toward them against the flow. Down there, Mouche thought, was Naibah, the capital, lost in the mists of the north, and beyond it the port of Gilesmarsh.
“The sea’s down there,” he whispered.
“No reason you can’t go to sea after you retire,” said Papa, hugging him close. “Maybe even buy a little boat of your own.”
“Ship,” said Mouche, imagining breakers and surf and the cry of waterkeens. “Ship.”
His thoughts were interrupted by a rumble, a shivering. At first Mouche thought it was just him, shaking with sadness, but it wasn’t him for the railing quivered beneath his fingers and the paving danced beneath his feet.
“Off the bridge,” said Papa, breathlessly.
They ran from the bridge, standing at the end of it, waiting for the spasm to end. Far to the east, the scarp was suddenly aglow, and great billows of gray moved up into the sky, so slowly they were like balloons rising. Down the river, one of the legs of the rotted wharf gave way, tipping it into the flow. Everything was too quiet until the shaking happened again, and yet again, with tiles falling from roofs and people screaming.
Then it stopped. The birdy-things began to cheep, people began to talk to one another, though their voices were still raised to a panicky level. Even the usually silent invisible people murmured in their flow, almost like water. The ominous cloud went on rising in the east, but the glow faded on the eastern ridge and the earth became solid once more.
Mouche remained bent over, caught in an ecstasy of grief and horror, come all at once, out of nowhere, not sure whether it was his heart or the world that was breaking apart.
“Boy?” Papa said. “Mouche? What’s the matter?”
“Oh, it hurts, it hurts,” he cried. It wasn’t all his own feeling, from inside himself. He knew that. It was someone else’s feeling, someone suffering, some huge and horrid suffering that had been let loose when the world trembled. Not his own. He told himself that. He wasn’t dying. He wasn’t suffering, not like that. His little pains were nothing, nothing, compared to that.
“There, there, boy, I know it does,” said Papa, completely misunderstanding. “But the pain will pass if you let it. Remember that, Mouche. The pain will pass, but you have to let it.” And he looked at Mouche with the anguish he had carefully kept the boy from seeing.