Sect Year 0 · tenth month · day 4 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court gate
He woke before the bell on the woodshed cot, with the cold coming up through the planks. For a breath or two he didn’t know where he was, and then he did, and the knowing was no worse than it had been the day before. The notice still hung on the door. Somebody had pinned it straight, and the wrong tone of his name caught the pale light through the gap. Pei had not torn it down, and he hadn’t expected her to. He sat up, set his feet on the boards, and found that his arms lifted without shaking.
At first light he cut the fourth notch in the post beside the woodshed door. Then he took the short hammer from its peg in the stable. There, the stable hand had made it clear he wanted it back before the bell, and walked down the lane to the main gate. The mist still lay on the flat stone slabs. Nobody in the Outer Court was awake enough to ask him what he wanted.
The gate was older than the Outer Court. It was oak gone black from handling, and it hung on two iron pins at each side, sunk into the stone and bent over at the top so the leaves could not lift away. Lin had walked through it perhaps a thousand times in three years, most of them pushing a barrow or carrying a bucket for the kitchen. He had never once looked at the pins.
He looked now. He set the head of the hammer against the upper pin on the left and tapped.
The note went up into the mist and came back clean.
He tapped the lower pin on the same side. Clean. He crossed to the right and did the same, upper and then lower. Each note rang out to its edge and stopped there, the way a good bell stops. He didn’t know why he was doing it. His hand seemed to know the weight of the head and the place where the iron would give under it, and he let the hand work.
He tried the small door in the wall beside the gate, the back gate the wagon drivers never used, and its pins were clean. He tried the bolt on the wicket. Clean. Then he went back and struck the upper pin on the right again, and that note came out clean too. For the first time since he had come to the Outer Court, he could tell which iron in it was telling the truth.
“What are you doing?”
The gate-warden had come out of his hut with a lantern hooked over one finger. Ruan Tiao was a bent man with a face like an old boot left out in the weather, and a stool he never sat on for long. He had kept the gate for thirty years, long enough that the Outer Court called him the top door beam, though never to his face.
“Tapping the pins,” said Lin.
“Why?”
“It rings true or it doesn’t.”
Ruan looked at the gate, and then at him. “It’s a gate.”
“Yes.”
The old man grunted, came down the step, and laid his palm flat on the upper hinge, the way a horse-dealer feels a leg for heat. “Go on, then.”
Lin struck the lower right pin again. This time the note was wrong: thin and flat, with a shiver at the far end that did not belong to iron.
He set his thumb against the iron, and the pin moved: a hair’s width in its socket. Where the iron went into the stone, a dark line ran all the way round, finer than thread.
“Hm,” said Ruan.
“It’s cracked.”
“I can see that.” The old man was quiet for a while. “Every dawn the wardens used to tap the pins. Then the Deacon’s predecessor cut our oil, and the tapping went with it. I’ve been on this gate thirty years and never once seen a pin cracked. Never once thought to look.”
“Have you got a thin wedge? Something hard.”
“Bronze?”
“Anything.”
“There’s no bronze in the Outer Court but the basin’s rim, and the basin-reader would have your hands for touching it. The Inner gate and the Elders’ pins get the rest, and they count it every quarter.” Ruan spread his hands. “Oak, then. Oak in iron. That’s how you lose a gate.”
“It’s how you hold one for a month.”
The old man made a noise that might have been a laugh, if he had been asked to show his teeth. “How did you know it was cracked?”
“It sang flat.”
“Gates don’t sing.”
“This one does, if you tap it.”
Ruan did not stop him going to the woodpile behind the stable wall. Lin chose a length of hard oak from the stack, split it along the grain with the hatchet, and shaved one end to a wedge with his knife. The knife had hung on the rafter for most of three years, and it was blunt. It took him longer than it should have. Ruan watched without offering to help, and Lin was grateful for that.
Lin set the wedge into the crack beside the pin and drove it home with a stone, one blow and then another, until the wood bit and held. Then he tapped the pin again.
The note came out dull at its edges, like a bell with a cloth laid over one side. But the pin no longer moved under his thumb, and when he leaned his weight on the leaf, the gate stayed where it was.
“True enough to hold,” said Ruan.
“True enough.”
“The Deacon counts oak by the cord, mind. He’ll want to know where the cord went.”
“I’ll put it back.”
“Then he’ll want to know why you took it out. He hates that worse than theft.”
A drill squad came down the lane from the mountain path: three Inner students in Core blue, their swords slung across their backs. Ruan lifted his lantern and eased the wicket open, and the three walked through the gap Lin had just finished. The last of them was a broad boy with a fresh bruise along his jaw. He stopped and looked at the wedge.
“Mending the gate for your own exit, cripple?”
“Somebody should keep it shut properly,” said Lin.
The boy laughed, and the other two laughed with him, and they went out onto the mountain road with the mist parting in front of them. Lin listened to their boots until the sound went under the noise of the stream. He didn’t mind the laugh as much as he would have a week earlier. It was only the sound of people who had not yet been asked to listen to anything.
He stood with the hammer in his hand and looked at the wedge. The oak was pale against the black wood. Nobody walking past would think it meant anything. He thought about the notice nailed to his woodshed door, and the report sealed in an Elder’s name that nobody had asked him to check. Three years of people telling him what he was, and not one of them had tapped anything to see whether it sounded true. He had believed them because nobody in the Outer Court had ever said anything else. Nobody had asked him to listen first.
Somewhere under his ribs a keeper knelt by a rail with a lamp and a hammer’s handle, listening for a thing he loved. Lin did not look at that keeper’s face. He knew the hands well enough. They had done this every night of a long life, and they had never once been thanked for it.
The sun came up over the east wall while he worked, and the light ran down the terraces one bench at a time and found the low places in the yard. The stream went from grey to silver. A small brown bird landed on the gate’s top rail, looked at the wedge with one bright eye, and flew off toward the Inner gate without comment.
“Twenty-six days,” he said aloud, to the gate. “If the Deacon counts honestly.”
Ruan came back from the hut with a tin cup. He poured hot water from the fire bowl into it, and his hands were steady in a way that Lin noticed. “Thirty years,” the old man said, “and you’re the first to come and tell me a pin was cracked. You didn’t say it. You rang it.” He held out the cup. “Come at the same hour tomorrow, if you want to keep at it. I don’t get many visitors who knock on iron.”
“I’ll come.”
“You’ll come with a better wedge, or I’ll tell the Deacon you’ve been stealing oak.”
Lin took the cup. The water was hot and tasted of charcoal and tin. He drank it standing, with both hands round the metal, and did not hurry.
When he gave the cup back and reached up to let go of the upper pin, the iron under his thumb was warm. He stood a moment longer than he needed to, feeling the heat go out of the metal, and he didn’t look round for whoever might have been there.
From the kitchen steps, far up the lane, Pei’s voice carried down through the mist. The porridge had gone cold, and the cook wanted to know whose fault that was.
“Mine,” Lin called back. He went up the lane with the hammer on his shoulder. The handle had sat in his palm the whole morning, and the skin there was pink and tingling. He wasn’t sorry.
At the stable the hand was waiting with his arms folded, as though he had been waiting a long time and meant to say so. “Did you break it?”
“I mended it.”
“Hm.” The stable hand took the hammer, weighed it in his fist, and hung it on its peg with the head turned to the wall. “Nobody mends anything in the Outer Court. They just wait for it to fall on somebody.”