My family has held the post of ferry-crier at the Flowing-Sands crossing for seven hundred years.
Crying the passengers is an old trade of the ferries. The boatman's eyes belong to the water; he cannot count heads. So the ferries kept us ravens. A passenger boards: one caw. A passenger lands: one caw. The boatman counts by ear — seven up, seven down, tally clean, push off. One caw short, and you turn back and search: usually a child slipped off to play in the shallows, or a drunkard asleep under the gangplank.
Do not underestimate that single caw. In seven hundred years, my family's voice has fished back thirty-nine human lives.
After the river died, the crossing fell mostly derelict. The weak-water became a sand-sea; the boats became sand-sledges; the passengers dwindled. But the crier's rule was never repealed. Grandfather said: so long as one passenger still crosses, there must be one caw. He kept that word until he died on his perch, and I took his post.
The year I took it, I discovered the thing.
There are passengers crossing whom we cannot see.
The first time was a windy dusk. The sledges had long gone home; the crossing was empty enough to hear my own heartbeat. I was drowsing on the old mast when my throat moved by itself — one caw, flung out into the dark. My feathers stood on end. A crier's caw is not a random noise: the pitch of that caw, unmistakably, was passenger aboard.
But the crossing held no one.
I stared until my eyes ached, sweeping every inch of sand. No footprints. No shadow. Not one displaced grain. My throat did not care. After about the time of one pole-push, it cawed again, by itself: passenger ashore.
One aboard. One ashore. Something had crossed the river — by the book.
Since then the empty caws have never stopped. No pattern: sometimes once a month, sometimes three times a night. Eclipse nights are the worst — a dozen full crossings can sing themselves through my throat before dawn.
I have tried keeping silent. Pressed my beak shut under a wing, buried my head in my own feathers. Useless. The caw does not come from the throat. It comes from the rule. Seven hundred years of the trade are carved into the blood: where there is a passenger, there is a caw — and the blood outranks me.
I tried, too, to learn what the passengers were. Scattered flour. Strung silk threads. Had brother Sand Wisp lay the crossing with his keenest listening-sand. Nothing: the flour never stirred, the threads never broke, the sand heard no footfall.
Only one thing responds: an old bronze bell dredged from the riverbed, the kind once tied to a ferry's bow. When the empty caws sound, the bell sways — softly — and the count of its swaying matches my caws exactly.
The bell is ferry property. And the bell recognizes the passengers.
So I have worked out half of it: whatever crosses is no evil thing. Evil silences a ferry-bell; it does not ring one. Only two kinds of soul can make a ferry's bell acknowledge them — those who were once boatmen, and those who were once passengers.
Three hundred years. What manner of old passengers still cross this dead river, trip after trip? Where from, and where to? Or — have they never managed to leave at all, only pacing the channel back and forth, waiting for a boat that can truly carry them?
The medicine-basket boy, during the days he mended the ford, heard my empty caws in the night. They frighten everyone else. Not him. He stood at the crossing and listened until dawn, and then asked me:
"These crossings — do more of them go west, or come back east?"
I froze. Seven hundred years of crying passengers — counting caws, never once counting directions.
From that night I paid attention. I counted one full month, and brought him the answer, and hearing it he went quiet:
not one crossing goes west.
Every one of them comes back from the west.
Aboard, ashore; aboard, ashore — three hundred years, and all of it homeward traffic.
What kind of gathering broke up, out there in the west? And why must those returning change boats at our crossing?
The boy has gone west. I tied the old bronze bell to his medicine basket, and I have gone with him.
The crier's rule: until every passenger is accounted for, the boat does not leave.
I need to see the west for myself — to learn how many passengers are still stranded on the road home.