Yael talked for a long time.
Not aimlessly, he had the specific quality of someone whose mind moved faster than most conversations could accommodate and who had therefore learned to talk at the pace required to keep the ideas from piling up behind each other. He talked the way he argued: with momentum, with evidence, with occasional detours that turned out not to be detours at all but approaches to the main point from an angle the main point needed.
The problem, he explained, was not the fish. The problem was not even the water rights, exactly. The water rights were a symptom. The actual problem was that the city of Gibeah had been organized, since its founding, around a principle that nobody had ever stated aloud and that everyone had therefore been unable to examine or contest: that prosperity was evidence of virtue.
The northern families had more because they had always had more because their founders had arrived first and had taken the better grounds and had built wealth on the better grounds and that wealth had then become the evidence that they were the kind of people who deserved the better grounds. The circularity of this had never been named. It had simply been lived, accumulated, passed down through generations until it was invisible the way air was invisible — not because it wasn't there, but because everything breathed it.
"So when the southern families petition for shared access," Yael said, leaning forward with the bread still in his hand, apparently having forgotten he was holding it, "they're not just asking for fish. They're implicitly challenging the premise that the northern families deserve what they have. And the northern families hear it that way — as an accusation — even though the southern families aren't saying that. They're just asking for fish."
"And both sides have been talking around this point for eleven years," Elham said.
"Longer than that. Eleven years of formal petitions. The actual problem is more likely forty years old." Yael finally noticed the bread and took a bite. "The petitions were always going to fail because you cannot resolve an accusation by addressing the fish. You can only resolve it by examining the premise. And nobody in this city has been willing to examine the premise because examining it would require the northern families to consider that their prosperity might not be entirely the result of their virtue, and it would require the southern families to consider that their grievance, though real, has become something larger than what actually happened to them."
Elham looked at him. At the seventeen-year-old eating bread in a temple who had, in approximately thirty minutes, produced a more precise diagnosis of Gibeah's central problem than anything Elham had put together from two hours at a window.
Asher was still against the wall, not pretending to be uninterested anymore. He was watching Yael with the focused attention he reserved for things that had earned it.
"You've been here two years," Elham said.
"Two years, four months, and approximately eleven days." Yael set the bread down. "I came to study. I stayed because—" He stopped. Something in his expression changed slightly, a fraction of the animation going still. "I stayed because I couldn't leave."
Elham said. "Tell me about it."
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Picked up the bread again.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Today show me what you need to see in the city. I'll explain myself tomorrow."
It was not avoidance — not entirely. It had the quality of a person who knew a conversation was necessary and was asking for one night to prepare for it. Elham recognized the request. He had made the same one himself in the lane after the festival in Dothan.
"Tomorrow," he agreed.
Yael stood up immediately, apparently relieved. "Good. Come on. I'll show you the city. I know everyone." He paused at the door and looked back at Asher. "You're coming too, right? With the sword?"
"The sword goes where I go," Asher said.
"Right. Yes. Obviously." Yael considered this. "Does it glow brighter in the dark? I feel like it would glow brighter in the dark."
Asher looked at him for a moment. "I don't know."
"We should test that later." He was already out the door.
Asher looked at Elham. Elham looked back. Something passed between them that was not quite amusement and not quite exasperation, it was entirely new to both of them.
They followed him out.
· · ·
Yael's relationship with the city of Gibeah was difficult to categorize. He was clearly not from here — his accent was slightly different, his manner of engaging with people had none of the wariness that long residence in a divided city produced. And yet he moved through the streets the way someone moved through a place they knew deeply, stopping to speak to people from both factions with the same warmth, remembered by both sides in the slightly puzzled way that people remembered someone who refused to behave according to the city's established rules.
He introduced them to a woman from the southern quarter who had been fishing since she was six and described the northern grounds with the specific longing of someone who had been told all her life that a thing was not for her. He introduced them to an elder from the northern quarter who was clearly uncomfortable with the way things had been going and had no language for the discomfort because the language available to him was the language of the premise he had never examined. He introduced them to a young man from neither faction who had grown up watching his parents take different sides and had developed, as a survival strategy, the ability to find the absurd thing in any situation and point it out.
"That one reminds me of someone," Yael said of the young man as they walked away.
"Who," Elham said.
Yael pointed at himself.
Elham almost smiled for the second time that day, which was more almost-smiling than he had done in weeks.
They were crossing the market quarter when Elham saw the man again. The one from the morning — dark-haired, broad-shouldered, the carpenter's hands. He was at a stall now, examining a piece of wood with the focused attention of someone whose relationship with material was professional rather than commercial. He turned it in his hands, checking the grain, running his thumb along the edge the way Elham had seen craftsmen do.
Elham watched him for a moment. Elham thought he has the look of someone the city would follow. If someone were going to lead here it could be someone like that.
He looked away. Looked back. Filed it as an observation. Set it beside what he was building in his head about the board.
"Who is that," he asked Yael.
Yael followed his gaze. "Tobiah. Carpenter. Benjamin family — one of the oldest lineages in the city but not northern, not southern, sort of adjacent to both. His family has been making furniture for Gibeah for three generations." He paused. "People trust him. Both sides. He's one of the only people in this city that both factions will complain to about each other, which means he spends a lot of time hearing about problems he didn't cause and can't fix."
"Does he want to fix them?"
Yael was quiet for a moment. Considering. "I think he wants the city to be what it was supposed to be. I don't think he thinks of that as fixing things — I think he thinks of it as the city finally working correctly." He paused again. "He's been offered elder positions three times. Refused all of them. He says the positions don't solve the problem, they just give someone a title while the problem continues underneath."
"He's right about that," Elham said.
"He usually is," Yael said. "It's a little annoying, honestly." But he said it with the warmth of someone who genuinely liked the person they were describing.
Elham watched Tobiah set the wood down, apparently having decided against purchasing it, and walk back through the market with the unhurried ease of someone who had nowhere to be and no performance to give.
The warmth was steady. No sharpening. No specific pointing. Just the warmth and the plan assembling itself and a carpenter walking through a market in a divided city that needed someone to lead it.
And in Elham's chest, underneath the warmth, something small and quiet that he was not yet looking at directly... was growing.
He could find him. Build the relationship. Guide him toward the position. He had done it before — he knew how it worked, he knew the moves. He could replace Abidan with Tobiah, he thought.
He filed the thought. Turned away from Tobiah.
"What else do I need to see today," he said to Yael.
Yael had already moved on to the next thing. "The harbor," he said over his shoulder. "You haven't seen the actual grounds yet. The dispute makes a lot more sense when you can see what they're actually fighting over."
They walked toward the harbor. The sea was visible at the end of every east-facing street in this part of the city — glimpsed between buildings, a grey-green brightness at the end of each lane, the reminder that everything happening in Gibeah was happening at the edge of something vast and indifferent.
Asher walked beside Elham. After a moment he said, quietly enough that Yael couldn't hear: "You're already building something."
Elham looked at him. "I'm just studying."
Elham held his gaze for a moment. Then looked ahead at Yael, who had stopped to say something to a woman with a fish basket and was making her laugh despite herself, apparently without trying.
He walked toward the harbor.