Kor

FROM THE MANUSCRIPT · READING EXCERPT

Enter the story

The last crate would not close. Kor knelt beside it with one knee on the flagstones and lifted the lid for the third time. Someone had packed a shallow cooking pan across the folded cloth at the top, its handle caught on the rim. He moved the pan, pressed the cloth down into the gap beneath, and tried again. The lid settled, though he had to lean on the warped wood while the woman beside him worked the fastening.

“You have packed enough for three households,” he said.

“I have left two households behind,” the woman said.

He glanced up at her. She was watching the fastening rather than his face, rubbing a thumb over the place where the metal had worn smooth. Until that morning the crate had stood under the window of her workroom, where he had helped carry it years ago, when the wood was still pale and the corners had not yet darkened from handling. It had left a clean rectangle in the dust, and she had shut the door on it. Kor tested the carrying strap. One stitched section had begun to pull apart.

“This will need another binding.”

“It only has to reach the other side.”

“It still has to be carried once it gets there.”

She let out a tired breath but took the length of cord he offered, and together they bound the crate, passing the cord under the base and drawing it tight across the lid. Around them the hall was full of work. Bundles were being counted beside the pillars. A child had fallen asleep against a rolled sleeping mat while his family argued over who had taken the water flask, and near the entrance two men were trying to shift a chest that had been loaded before anyone thought about the width of the passage. Kor could have told them it would not fit. He went to help turn it.

He had expected departure to sound different. Now the hour had come, and the hall rang with the scrape of wood, the creak of straps, people asking after things they had misplaced. Someone wanted a knife. Someone else had packed the knife. The child by the sleeping mat woke and cried because his feet were cold. Past the gathered families the Gate stood in its fitted surround, and Kor kept his eyes on the chest until they had it clear.

By midday the rooms behind the hall were empty. He went through them once more, opening cupboards and storage recesses and finding little that had not already been weighed and left: broken pottery beside a hearth, a broom worn nearly to its binding, a low stool with one loose leg. A narrow strip of sun came through an upper opening and lay on the floor where they had all eaten together the evening before. In the workroom he found a cup with a chipped rim. He carried it back to the hall, where the woman with the overfilled crate had taken her place among those waiting, and when he held it out she shut her eyes.

“I looked for that.”

“It was behind the water vessel.”

“I thought I had looked there.”

She tucked it into the folds of her outer garment.

“There is still room for you,” she said.

He had heard this from her before, and from others, and earlier that morning he had answered it easily enough. Now the child was being lifted from his mat and the bundles were moving forward, and he had nothing ready.

“I know.”

“You could come through and decide afterward.”

He looked past her to the open entrance. Outside a cart stood by the steps with one wheel raised on a block; he had promised to repair it. Farther down the slope, beyond the buildings being emptied, smoke rose from the homes that were still lived in.

“If I go,” he said, “I will have decided.”

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End of excerpt. This site presents a selection from the manuscript.