The Knot

In the seventh ditch thieves and serpents trade places without stopping, and the knot is that exchange halted at one point: inside it nobody can say any longer which is which. It stands at three quarters of the span, that is past the point from which you see it and short of the far end, and it rears instead of lying flat, because a volley fired at close range passes straight over anything lying on the deck and moves nothing. It covers the deck from edge to edge: each body takes up thirty four centimetres of radius, and what is left at the sides is less than a person needs to get by.

This is the trial the ribaldo was written for, and until now it did not exist. From the sixth ditch down the punishment is on the floor and the road is above it, four spans in a row without a single contact, and you reached the pit with a satchel full of nails and a full quiver without having fired a shot. How many bodies make the knot is settled by the quiver and not by the bridge, because it has to be undone even by someone arriving with no nails, one arrow at a time, pulled back out afterwards; and how wide it opens is settled by the fan of a volley and not by the deck, because taken from the deck the outer bodies fell outside the angle and one volley was no longer enough.

Undone means undone. A scattered soul pulls itself back together after twenty two seconds, so here the bodies go for good: without that the end of the bridge opened while the span walled itself up again. While it holds, the knot says from six metres away what it wants, and repeats it every five seconds, so whoever stops in front of it is not left staring at a mute wall.