Sect Year 0 · tenth month · day 9 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court gate
Sweeping the stone steps of the Outer Court gate was meant to be a punishment. Lin had become good at it, which Hou Meng had not intended. Every step had to be swept from the top down, the leaves gathered into a single line and the line lifted away on a board. That way, nothing was left in the cracks where the damp sat. The mist was still coming off the terraces, and the stream below the road was loud with the night’s rain. He had done the top three steps by the time the carriage came over the mountain road, and he finished the fourth before he looked up.
Ruan had come out of the hut to watch, with his lantern still burning in the grey. “Heron on the door,” he said, as though he were naming a horse. “That’s Xu Bairen. He comes down once a season to count the kitchen’s plums and tell the Deacon his masons are idle.”
“Does he count them?”
“Every one. He always finds one missing, and the cook always swears he never had it.”
The carriage was lacquered plain, black with a thin red edge. A bird was painted on its door in pale gold, a heron standing on one leg with its beak lowered, as though it had lost something in the reeds. Two grey horses drew it. The driver did not look at the gate. He looked at the steps, and then at the broom in Lin’s hands, and then at the steps again.
Students straightened along the wall. Hou Meng came out of his office at a half-run, his cuffs undone and ink on one of them. He had to stop himself from bowing before he reached the foot of the steps, and he stopped too late, and the bow came out crooked.
Elder Xu Bairen stepped down from the carriage slowly. He was old, in a grey robe with the sleeves gathered at the wrist, and his face was creased like a field after rain. He carried a walking staff with a brass foot. When he set the staff on the top step, the brass rang on the stone. He lifted it and tapped it again, lightly, and tilted his head to listen.
“Good stone,” he said. “Your masons are lazy, Deacon. I have told you so for twenty years.”
“Elder.” Hou Meng bowed again, straighter this time. “The outer rolls. I’ll have them brought at once.”
“Bring them. I want to see the count.” But he didn’t look toward the office. He looked down the steps at Lin, who had stopped sweeping and was standing with the broom at his side. “Which one is the cautionary tale?”
“Cang, Elder,” said Hou Meng. “Lin Cang.”
“Tell him to come here.”
Hou Meng called down the steps in a voice that was not quite his own, and Lin came up. He stopped two steps below the Elder and gave the bow an Outer student gives, which is correct and no lower. Xu looked him over the way a buyer looks at a horse he doesn’t intend to buy.
“What do you do with your mornings?”
“Sweep, Elder. Tap things.”
“Tap what?”
“Pins. Rims. Steps.”
“The Inner Court would call that a waste of breath.”
“It’s cheap, Elder.”
The old man’s mouth moved, very slightly. “Good. A waste of breath is the only kind the Inner Court can’t charge for.” He turned the staff in his hand. “How many days do you have?”
“Twenty-one, Elder.”
“Good. Come to me when you reach the fourth layer, not before. I don’t waste an afternoon on first layers. I have already wasted one this year on a basin-reader’s ledger.”
Hou Meng’s face lost its colour all at once, the way a cloth loses water when it is wrung. “Elder, the Outer Court’s measures are—”
“Measures.” Xu did not look at him. “Measures are what we agree to, Deacon, when we have not yet found out what is so.”
Lin considered the step under his feet. The sentence stayed with him. It was the first thing an Elder had said to him in three years that sounded as though somebody had thought about it before saying it. Then he said, carefully, “May I ask why, Elder?”
“Because the basin-reader has been telling the kitchens about you. The kitchens tell the Inner Court everything before the Deacon hears of it.”
“The kitchen has very little to do, Elder,” said Lin. “It has to talk about something.”
Somewhere behind Hou Meng a kitchen hand made a sound that was quickly swallowed. Xu’s mouth moved again, and this time it stayed moved for a breath longer. He set the brass foot of his staff on the step below Lin’s feet, tapped it, and listened to the stone answer.
“Sweep the top step again,” he said. “The Deacon’s masons did not lay it straight, and you’re the only man at this gate who can see it.”
Lin looked at the top step, which was straight. He said nothing. Xu seemed to find that satisfactory.
A junior clerk came down the steps at last with the outer rolls held against his chest like a sick child. Xu took them without looking at him. He opened them on the top step. The paper was thin and yellow at the folds, and the names had been written by at least three different hands over the years. He ran one finger down the column of names, and the finger stopped about halfway.
“Cang, Lin,” he read aloud. “Three years on the same line.”
Hou Meng opened his mouth.
“The rolls are what the Deacon writes,” said Xu, “when he is tired of being asked.” He closed them with a snap that made the clerk jump. “Thank you, Deacon. I have seen enough of the count.”
The old man turned back toward the carriage. As he did, Lin’s eyes went up the terrace above the gate. There, the stone walls of the Outer Court gave way to the stair that climbed toward the Inner gate. A sallow clerk stood at the rail there in the grey of the Gao household. He had a small book open on one palm, and he was writing in it. He wrote quickly, then shut the book and tucked it into his sleeve, and he went down the far side of the stair without once looking at the carriage. Lin tried to read the hand upside down, the way Su had made him learn to read a page, and could make out nothing but a column of small marks, each one with a short tail on it.
Gao Wen came down the same stair from above, two friends behind him, laughing at something that had been said in the Inner Court. He saw the carriage at the gate. He saw the bird on its door. He saw Lin on the steps. For once in his life he didn’t laugh. He stopped on the third step with one hand on the rail and stood there, looking at the old Elder’s back. Their eyes met across the width of the stair. Gao Wen’s mouth worked on something he didn’t say. Then he turned round and went back up the way he had come, slowly, like a man who has remembered something he left behind.
The Inner stair was built of a paler stone than the gate’s, and years of feet had worn each tread hollow at the centre. That way, Lin could see the shape of every step that had ever been climbed. He would be on those steps by the afternoon. He hadn’t decided yet how he felt about that.
Xu got into the carriage with the driver’s help. The door shut on the bird. The horses turned, the wheels rolled out onto the mountain road, and the sound of the brass foot went with them for a while, a small bright note against the stone, until the stream covered it.
Hou Meng stood at the foot of the steps with his cuffs still undone. He didn’t look at Lin. He looked at the empty road.
For three years nobody of consequence had looked at Lin for longer than it took to find fault with him. Now an Elder had looked at him for the length of a sweep, and had read his name aloud from a roll, and had said something about the count that the Deacon would be chewing on for a week. Lin found that he didn’t like being looked at that way. He found, too, that he wasn’t frightened of it. He was only watchful, and he kept his feet where he could see them.
“You’ll sweep the Inner stair this afternoon, as well as the gate. Every step, and slowly.”
“Yes, Deacon.”
“You will not make me a fool in front of the Elders.”
“I don’t intend to make anyone anything,” said Lin.
The Deacon turned on his heel and went back into his office and shut the door hard enough to rattle the window.
Ruan came and stood beside Lin with the lantern, which was no longer needed in the new light. “He’ll be back when the plums come in,” the old man said.
“Will you tell me when?”
“I’ll tell the cook. The cook will tell the kitchen. The kitchen will tell the Inner Court before I’ve finished my tea.” He sniffed at the air. “That’s how this gate has always worked. Nobody says a thing, and everybody knows it by noon.” He looked at the steps, and at the broom Lin had propped against the wall. “The Inner stair is yours this afternoon. Mind the top tread. Nobody’s ever swept it straight.”
The sallow clerk came down the terrace stair again a few moments later, crossed the forecourt without hurrying, and passed out through the gate-wicket that Ruan had opened for him. At the gap he took his book from his sleeve and leaned on the oak, the gate Lin had tapped and wedged only days before. Then he wrote one more line before he was out of sight on the mountain road.