Sect Year 0 · tenth month · day 8 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court kitchen
Before the bell the yard was dim and wet, and the rope on the well-bucket had frozen stiff overnight so that it cracked when he pulled it. Lin had woken on the cot well before the bell with his arms warm and no memory of the dark between. He had lain there listening to the kitchen wake up, the scrape of a grate and the first cough of the stove, and then he had got up and gone out for the water.
The kitchen was full of steam, and the cook had his back to the door and his opinions in the air. Lin came in under them with a pole across his shoulders and two water buckets swinging from it. The cook said, without turning round, that outer students who wanted breakfast could go to the Inner Court and beg for it.
“I’m carrying water.”
“You’re carrying your breakfast. Shut the door. The steam’s getting out to the Deacon.”
Lin set the buckets by the big copper and shut the door. The week before, Hou Meng had posted a new rule on the kitchen wall in his own hand, the ink still wet on it: servants at the fires must tie back their sleeves. Everybody had read it. Nobody had obeyed it, and the cook had burned his forearm twice in four days. Lin had taken a length of cord from the rafter and tied his own sleeves back at the wrist. Now he stood at the copper with the heat on his face and his forearms bare to the elbow, and he was the only person in the kitchen doing what the rule said.
The cook looked at the bare arms, then at the kettle on its hook over the fire. “Lift that off, then, if you’re so handy. Use the cloth.”
Lin did not reach for the cloth. He took the kettle’s iron bail in his bare right hand, the heel of his palm against the hot ring, and swung it off the hook. The heat came through his skin as warmth and no more. He set the kettle on the stone without a sound. The cook stared at the hand as though it might have grown a second thumb.
“You’ll burn.”
“I didn’t.”
The cook pushed up his own sleeve. A rag was wound round his forearm, stained yellow with lard and salve, and when he lifted it, a blister the size of a plum showed underneath, shining wet.
“Copper,” he said. “Because I didn’t tie mine.” He pulled the sleeve down again and turned back to his rice. “Outer rations are for the outer, cautionary tale. You won’t be outer much longer. Then you can eat the Inner Court’s bread and choke on it.”
The runner from the Deacon’s office put his head round the far door. He had a face like a purse with its strings pulled. “Cautionary tale. The Deacon wants rice in his office. Bring it yourself, and don’t spill it on the ledger.”
Hou Meng sat behind a table stacked with rolls, a brush in one hand and his cuffs still stained to the wrist. He didn’t look up when Lin set the bowl down. He looked at Lin’s arms instead, and at the cord that had been tied and untied and tied again around the wrists.
“You’ve tied your sleeves.”
“The rule says tie them, Deacon.”
“The rule says a great many things. Nobody else in my kitchen can read.” He lifted a spoonful of rice, tasted it, and grimaced. “It’s cold.”
“It was hot when I carried it.”
“Everything is cold by the time it reaches me.” He set the spoon down and wiped it on a clean corner of the roll. The office smelled of ink and animal fat and the damp of the wall. “The Inner woman came to my door on the sixth with a ledger and a face like a shut book. She had the count right. I dislike her for it.” He glanced up then, briefly, and looked away again. “Thirty days, cautionary tale. Then you pack. Don’t make me read the rule about that as well.”
“Yes, Deacon.”
“And tell Pei the stirs are counted by the Deacon, not by humming.”
Lin said nothing, because there was nothing in it he could safely answer. When he went back down the passage with the empty bowl, he heard the Deacon say, to the rolls on his table, “The only thing in this kitchen that never goes out of tune,” and then a sigh that might have been a laugh.
Across the kitchen the cook bellowed for salt. “Little Pei! The salt, before the rice goes to glue!”
“Pei,” said a voice from the pantry door, with no hurry in it. “Just Pei. Little is for the kitchen cat.”
Pei came round the copper with a bowl balanced on her forearm when he got back. She set it into his hands the way she set down everything, without asking whether he wanted it. He took it. Her eyes went down to his right hand, which was holding the bowl, and stayed there.
“Turn it up.”
“It’s porridge, Pei.”
“Turn it up to the lamp.” She had the lamp off its hook before he could decide whether to refuse. She held it low and waited. He shifted the bowl to his left hand and turned the right palm up, and the light swung across it and steadied.
Across the heel of the palm, and along the first two fingers, lay a ridge of skin, pale and hard and smooth. It was the place where a rope wears a hand that has held it for years. It hadn’t been there in the spring. He hadn’t noticed it arriving.
“Where did you get these?” She pressed her thumb into the ridge. It didn’t hurt him, and that was strange, because he could feel the pressure all the way up his wrist. “You haven’t carried anything heavier than a bucket in three years.”
“I don’t know.”
“You sound like an Elder.”
“I’m told it’s a bad sign.”
She turned his hand over and back again, frowning at it, as if the palm might explain itself if she held it at the right angle.
“It’s like a rope burn that stayed,” she said. Then she looked at the left hand, which was smooth as it had always been.
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe. I’ve had rope burns. Mine went white in a week.” She let go of his wrist. “Yours went hard, and it kept its shape. Yours don’t hurt at night, either. That’s the odd part.”
“Do yours?”
“Every night. Twelve years of other people’s water and my knuckles are lumps like boiled walnuts.” She held up her own hands for him to see, red at the joints and cracked along the nails, and then she put them back in her apron. “Yours are the wrong kind of quiet.”
Lin looked at the ridge in the lamplight. There was a rope under it somewhere. He could feel the drag of a line running through his fist in the dark, and iron under the fist, and a pin that had to be tapped before anyone could sleep. The memory had no edges, only weight. He let the thought run as far as the rope and no further, the way a man stops at the edge of ice to see whether it will bear. He knew the shape of the thing and not its cause.
“My hands know something,” he said. “They don’t tell me what.”
“Hands don’t know anything. They do what they’re told.”
“Then somebody told them.”
Pei gave him the look she gave the cook when he swore the lard had gone to the Inner Court. “Somebody told them a great many things. None of them was Hou Meng.”
She went back to the pots. The new rule had come with a new count, she said over her shoulder. Each kitchen hand was to stir the big pot a hundred times before the rice was let to settle, because the Deacon had decided a hundred was all a person could count without losing track. “So I count by humming,” said Pei. “It keeps the stirs straight. Don’t you dare tell him.”
“He knows.”
“Then he can tell me himself.”
Lin watched her. She had a wooden spoon in each hand, one for the rice and one for the pot’s edge, and her shoulders moved with the strokes. She was humming. The tune went up, and it hung at the top for a breath, and then it sat down and waited before it climbed again.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.” She didn’t look round. “Something.”
“It goes up and then it stops.”
“It stops where the stirs are done.” She pushed a strand of hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist and went on stirring, and the tune went on with the spoon.
Lin found that his own mouth had begun to shape the tune, and he shut it at once. The cook had turned round with a ladle in his fist and an expression that would have stopped a cart on the mountain road.
“Keep your sleeves tied, then,” Pei said, without looking at him. “The Deacon’s counting the oven now as well.”
“I’ll tie them.”
“Good. Then somebody in this kitchen is doing as they’re told.”
Lin untied the cord at his wrists. The sleeves fell, and the ridge went under the cloth where he couldn’t see it, though he could still feel it there, a band of hard skin with the warmth of the copper on it. In the lamplight it had looked like the notches on the doorpost, counted in a different hand. He had been counting his own days for eight mornings now, and the count did not feel his own.
He picked up the bowl again. The porridge had gone a little cold while he watched her. He drank it standing. It was too thick and too hot at the bottom, and he didn’t mind.