Pella’s grandmother wanted to sell her last buttons on Saturday. The baker wanted the broken statue gone by Friday.
Pella, an apprentice stoneworker, had one day to repair it.
Saturday would be Grandmother’s last market here. On Sunday she would move to her son’s house upriver, too far away to walk back. The town’s bridge had just reopened, so plenty of shoppers would come.
The baker’s cart had caught the statue’s broken foot before. He wanted a clear path for Friday’s delivery.
“If you put your foot under my wheel,” the baker told the statue, “you deserve what happens.”
The statue was a chimera: one stone body with three heads. It gave no reply. Its lion face looked down the main street, its goat face looked toward the river, and its serpent head curved behind the other two to inspect the baker’s upper window. No one had seen it move for ninety years. People were more exact about the ninety years than about what had happened before them.
Pella knelt beside the damaged left foot with a measuring rule. She was an apprentice, which meant that people allowed her to hold things while they explained how to hold them. She had spent six weeks holding stones for the reopened bridge. Here was a repair she could finish herself.
The chimera stood on two stone bases, with a broad slab joining them. Musicians had once played there. Now Grandmother set her basket and stool on it.
One stone under the statue’s left foot had split. The foot pressed on an edge of the slab, tipping it toward Grandmother’s basket. Pella’s master had a crane that could lift the statue. But it would not return from the bridge for two weeks. Until then the market keeper had closed the platform. Her grandmother kept bringing her basket to the wall beside it.
“I used to get customers,” her grandmother said. “Now I get survivors.”
Pella offered to make her a stall elsewhere.
“I know this shade.”
That was all she would say about moving.
Pella brushed dust from words carved along the statue’s base. She knew the old lettering because her master made apprentices read measurements on stones before giving them new ones to carve.
What rests on two separated banks, carries us between, and has nowhere to stand when the banks become one?
“A bridge,” she said.
Nothing happened.
She said it louder. A pigeon moved from the lion’s ear to its nose.
The musician who played at the market stopped beside her. He carried his little fiddle in a case so much larger than it needed that Pella had always suspected a second career inside.
“You’re supposed to say it where all three can hear,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“My father said. His father said. You can take that as far back as you like.”
“Why didn’t you wake it?”
“A fiddle isn’t a bridge. I tried that answer for years.”
He wanted his platform back. The baker wanted a clear passage. Neither wanted to stand behind a serpent head, but Pella persuaded the baker by explaining that a walking statue might move its own foot.
“It had better,” he said.
The musician took his place by the goat. Pella stood before the lion. Together, after one false start caused by the baker asking whether to say a bridge or just bridge, they gave the answer.
The pigeon left with great conviction.
Stone eyelids opened. The serpent turned to regard the baker. The goat drew a long breath that smelled of rain. The lion said, “At last.”
Pella forgot her prepared greeting.
“We need your foot,” she said.
The lion looked offended. “I need it too.”
The three heads kept interrupting one another as they explained. They could move their heads and legs, but they could not leave the two bases. If the joining slab broke, they would fall asleep as stone again. They had been put there to mind the crossing when the river bridge was new. The river had shifted away over the centuries; the square had filled the old bank.
The goat remembered the first boats. The lion remembered the first procession. The serpent remembered that the procession had refused to pay the boatmen.
“A regrettable opening,” it said.
Pella pointed to the split stone under the foot. She could fit a new stone there so the foot’s weight rested on the base again. Then she would fill the gaps with mortar, a wet mixture that hardens between stones. She had the stone, the tools and permission from the market keeper. She needed the creature to hold its weight off that foot while she worked.
The lion eagerly lifted it. Its warm breath swept over Pella’s first patch of mortar. A crack opened through the drying surface.
“That’s too hot,” she said.
“Strength,” said the lion, “requires heat.”
“My bread requires heat,” the baker said. “This is a foot.”
The goat offered to undo the lion’s heat. Before Pella could set down her trowel, it blew cool mist over the next patch. It grew wet and slumped between the stones.
“Gentleness,” the goat began.
“Please stop breathing on it,” Pella said.
She scraped the spoiled material into her bucket. She would have to fetch more. Her grandmother watched from the shade with a button needle held in her mouth; she was replacing one on the musician’s coat while he supplied commentary.
“They can stay awake, can’t they?” he asked. “I have a tune with three parts.”
The serpent turned toward him. “We have heard enough proposals for parts.”
Pella sat on the low wall and dusted her hands. She imagined her master telling the lion to stop. Her master had a beard that appeared to have been quarried. Pella had a split thumbnail and a bucket full of expensive mistakes.
“You may hold the stone,” she told the lion. “No heat.”
“The goat will freeze it.”
“The goat may cool you, if you become uncomfortable. Not the stone.”
“And me?” said the serpent.
Its eyes could see beneath the raised foot where Pella’s head would not fit.
“Tell me when the surfaces touch.”
The serpent lowered its head until one eye was level with the crack. “They do not touch now.”
“I know.”
“Your new stone is too tall at the back.”
She put the rule under the foot, checked, and found that it was.
For the next hour, the lion held, the goat kept the lion from getting too hot, and the serpent reported gaps with the satisfaction of someone long denied an audience for bad news. Pella trimmed the back of the stone. When it fitted, she set it and packed the narrow joints. The mortar still needed time to harden. But the fitted stone could hold the foot’s weight now.
“Down slowly,” she said.
The lion lowered the foot. The slab stayed level.
The baker pushed his empty cart along its usual route. Its wheel passed clear. He pushed it back, suspicious of success occurring only once.
“You could have moved your cart farther over,” Pella told him.
“And you could have told your grandmother to leave.”
They considered each other. Then the baker went indoors and returned with a loaf, which he placed beside her tools.
The foot still looked broken. Its missing outer claw would take another stone and another day. Pella resisted the urge to fill the hollow with spare mortar and call it finished.
On Saturday the market keeper checked the repair and opened the slab as a bench. She blocked off the damaged corner while the mortar hardened. Pella’s grandmother sold six brass buttons to a woman who had come to see the awakened monster and stayed to mend her cuff. She sold two more to the baker.
The musician opened his case. It contained a fiddle, a bow and a very large lunch.
He offered the chimera his grand three-part procession tune.
“Something smaller,” the serpent said.
The goat agreed. The lion began to object, caught Pella looking at the new joint, and closed its mouth.
The musician played a tune short enough to learn while waiting for a boat. Pella’s grandmother hummed it with three buttons in her palm. The lion held its foot very still.
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