On the seventh morning of Seyun’s visit to the compound, the sun rose clear and sharp over the frosted kale leaves in the southern vegetable beds. Beside the low dry-stone wall separating the cabbages from the sparring gravel lay a squared eight-by-eight timber of seasoned white oak, six feet long, supplied by the riverwright whose son trained in Kes’s afternoon class. The lower three feet of the beam had been charred lightly over an oak fire and brushed with pine tar so ground moisture wouldn’t rot the heartwood over the winters to come.
Seyun hung his grey hemp coat on the porch peg, checked that his left shoulder wrap was snug beneath his shirt. Then he picked up a long-handled iron digging spade from the tool shed. Across the gravel, Daro Kesh arrived carrying a heavy cast-iron earth rammer and a carpenter’s brass line-weight bob wound on a spool of waxed hemp cord. Meanwhile, Kes brought a wheelbarrow of crushed river gravel and a bucket of stiff grey clay from the creek bank.
In the stories told by tavern minstrels, two Jade fighters setting a training pillar in a courtyard would have made a performance of it. One fighter lifting the two-hundred-pound oak beam with a single hand and driving it three feet into the soil with a palm strike of condensed breath. That left the earth trembling while new students watched in awe.
