The morning would matter to Baim for the rest of his life — and, his people believed, for a good while after it, since the dead do not leave, they only change their form and stay. That it was an ordinary morning was the whole of its worth, though he did not know that yet. A man never knows which of his ordinary mornings he will one day be made to grieve. He woke a free man in a free country, and had no reason under the wide sky to suppose he would ever be anything else.
He rose before the compound stirred and walked out to look at his fields, because a man who works the land learns to read it the way a mother reads a sleeping child's face — by small signs, before anything is wrong. The sorghum stood tall and heavy-headed; the millet was coming; the low ground where he had taught the water to turn back on itself, against the way water wishes to go, was black and rich and giving. His grandfather had shown him how the water could be argued with. He had improved on his grandfather. His own sons would improve on him. That was how his people measured wealth — not in a heap of coins that sat and did nothing, but in knowledge handed down and added to, generation over generation, until a family's name meant these are the people who know how to make the dry ground answer.
By the time the sun was properly up, the town was awake and loud with its own competence. From the smith's compound came the ring of the hammer — and everyone who passed it lowered their voices a little, the way you do near something holy, because the blacksmith took the black rock out of the earth and the fire out of the air and married them into a thing that had not existed before, and a man who can make iron out of stone is a man who has been trusted with a piece of God's own trade. The weavers sat in their doorways drawing raffia into cloth so fine that far away, in courts Baim would never see, pale kings paid in gold for a single length of it and thought they had got the better of the bargain. There were men laying a wall of dressed stone; men counting cattle; women coming back from the river with the day's water balanced and their hands entirely free, talking. A market ran along the wide street where you could buy palm oil and dried fish and copper bracelets and salt carried a hundred miles and medicine and song. No one in it was starving. No one in it was owned.
And above it all, on the rise, stood the court of the king — the mani, the lord of that country — where the great matters were weighed. Baim went up that morning, as he often did, because a king who is wise keeps a nganga close, and this one was wise. In the shaded court the lords argued a boundary dispute between two villages, and Baim watched the king listen — really listen, for the better part of the day, to farmers and their grandmothers and the men who remembered where the old stones had been set — before he ruled, and ruled in a way that left both villages able to look each other in the eye at the next festival. That was governing. It was slow, and it was careful, and it was answerable to the memory of the people, and any man who later called these a people without law had simply never troubled to sit in that shade and watch the law being done.
But it was Baim's other work that the king had truly summoned him for, and it was the work no coin could buy and no stranger could learn in a season. When the court emptied, the king spoke to him low, of a dream that had troubled his sleep three nights running, and Baim listened the way he listened to his fields — for the small signs, before anything is wrong. He was a farmer of the seen world and a farmer of the unseen, and to his people these were not two things. He tended the living and he tended the dead, who were not gone, only turned to another form and standing just behind the shoulder of the world. He knew which leaf closes a wound and which one opens a door. He knew how to stand in the thin place where this country and the country of the ancestors lean up against each other, and to carry a word across, and carry one back, and not fall in. It had taken him thirty years to learn to do it and not fall in.
That evening he went home to his own compound and his own people, and there was meat, and there was the beer his wife made better than anyone would say to her face, and the children lied about how much work they had done and were believed, on purpose, because it was a festival kind of evening and no one wanted to be the one who ended it. Someone began, softly, to sing — an old one, older than the oldest person there could account for, a song that had come down so many hands that its words had worn smooth as a river stone. And they all took it up, because they all knew it; because it was theirs; because a people who share a song that old are not a scattering of bodies that happen to stand near one another, but a single thing with a very long memory.
Baim sat among them in the falling dark, full, and unhurried, and loved, and entirely unaware that he was, at that moment, everything a man could be — a lord of his own knowledge, a bridge between the worlds, a free person in a free land, holding in his two ordinary hands a life so complete that the only thing that could ever be done to it was to take it away.
Far off, on the coast, where none of them had any cause to look that night, the sea went on being the sea. It had carried nothing to them yet. It was only water, at the edge of a country that was whole.