Sect Year 0 · tenth month · day 10 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court woodshed
By dusk the post beside the woodshed door had ten cuts in it, spaced as evenly as the teeth of a comb. Lin ran his thumb down the row the way he had every evening since the first morning. The cuts were not deep. The wood around the top ones had darkened to the colour of a walnut shell where his thumb had gone over them so many times. He had made each cut with the same short pull of the blade at first light, and each had cost him a little less thought than the one before. He didn’t yet know whether that was a good sign.
He had been to the gate for four mornings running. Ruan had let him tap the pins and had let him stand with his back to the hut while he did it. On the fourth morning the old man had said, without looking up from his fire bowl, that the Deacon had sent a runner asking why the gate was humming.
“What did you tell him?”
“That it’s a gate.”
The wedge held. The lower right pin rang a little less flat each morning, and Lin had begun to think of it as the only thing in the Outer Court that was improving on schedule.
Pei came round the woodpile with a lamp in one hand and a shawl over her shoulders. She set the lamp on the chopping block and sat on the upturned bucket by the door. The bucket had been hers since she was nine, and everyone in the kitchen understood it to be hers.
“What are the notches?”
“Days I’ve been given.”
“Gao Wen has had three years of Inner Court bread,” said Pei, “and he’s still a dog.”
“He’s a student.”
“That’s what I said.” She tucked her feet under her skirt. The woodshed smelled of cut pine and damp, and the lamp made the walls look older than they were. “What do you do on the thirtieth, if you haven’t got to the fourth layer?”
“Pack.”
“Then I’ll pack the porridge. I’ve already got the pot.” She looked pleased with herself, the way she always did when she had found a use for something nobody had asked her to find one for.
Lin said nothing for a while. Then he told her what Elder Xu had said at the gate, and how the Deacon had gone the colour of the ash in the stove. He left out the clerk. He couldn’t have said why.
Pei took it in the way she took everything, with her head on one side and her lips moving a little as she sorted it into order. “Reformists pay the kitchen in pickled plums,” she said at last. “They send them round in baskets with the carriages. The cook eats every one himself, in the storeroom, where he thinks nobody can see.”
“Is that true?”
“Everything the cook does is true. That’s his trouble.” She was pleased and suspicious at the same time, and she didn’t trouble to hide either. “What does he want, the old man? He doesn’t want you for your face.”
“He wants the fourth layer.”
“Everyone wants the fourth layer. The Deacon wants it so he can say he has one more outer student to send away.” She picked at a splinter on the bucket rim. “And the sallow one came into the kitchen this afternoon, while you were at the gate. Sat on the flour sacks with his little book and asked the cook how many bowls you eat in a day.”
Lin looked up. “What did the cook say?”
“One. Because that’s all you’re getting.” She reached into her apron, drew out a plum wrapped in a dock leaf, and set it on the chopping block beside the lamp. “Reformist. Stolen. The cook will hang me for it, and then he’ll eat the rope.”
Lin laughed, once, and was surprised by it. He picked up the plum. It was sour enough to make his jaw ache, and under the sourness was a salt that caught at the back of his throat.
“He said he doesn’t waste an afternoon on first layers,” Lin said. “Xu.”
“Then he’s a fool, or he knows something.”
“Which?”
“Old men are always both. The cook says so, and the cook’s old.” She pulled the shawl tighter. “I want a pot with a lid that stays on.”
Lin turned the plum over in his fingers. “When I’m gone,” he said, “do you keep the bucket?”
Pei looked at him for a long moment, and for once she didn’t have a quick answer. “It’s mine,” she said. “I didn’t ask whether it was yours to give.”
“It’s yours.”
“I know it’s mine.” She wiped her nose on the back of her wrist, which she would have hit anyone else for seeing. “I wanted you to say it out loud, that’s all. Then I’ll know you meant it, when you’re gone and eating somebody else’s bread.”
“And if they send me down the mountain road?”
“Then you’ll walk it.”
“Which way?”
“Whichever way’s downhill.” Pei laughed before she could stop herself, a short sound that she clapped a hand over. “That’s the stupidest thing you’ve said all year, and I’ve been listening to you all year.”
Lin got up from the bucket and went to the cot and sat on its edge with his back to the wall. The jade slip lay in its cloth under the pillow, where he had put it the night he came down from the spring. He didn’t reach for it. The thirty days had stopped feeling like a figure on the Deacon’s board. They had become something he could measure with his breath, and the measure was not yet enough.
The breathing sheet the Outer Court gave every student was pinned by the basin, a list of counts in a clerk’s hand that nobody read after the first week. Lin had read it every night for a month, and he didn’t need it now. He breathed in for four, held for four, and let it out for four. The warmth came first to the channel at the base of the spine. It had been open since the dawn at the end of the ninth month, when he had woken on this cot and found that his arms could lift. The warmth went up through the first channel without a catch. It reached the second, the wide one that ran under the ribs, and there it stopped, the way a rope stops when its end catches on a nail.
He held still. The knot did not give. It had a texture, if a thing made of breath can have one. It was dense and a little gritty, and each time the warmth touched it, the grit seemed to draw in on itself and wait to see what the warmth would do next. He breathed in for four and held, and the warmth pressed against the knot like a hand against a door that has swollen in the damp. At the fifth breath the knot gave a little. The warmth slipped through the gap, and then the gap closed again, and he was left holding the same warmth in the same place. He held it longer than he meant to.
“Pei,” he said, without opening his eyes. “You’re counting.”
“I’m not counting. I’m watching you hold your breath like a fool.”
“You can stop watching.”
“You stop counting when I talk to you,” she said. “You said you would.”
“I said I’d try.”
“You never try. You just go quiet and do it anyway, and then I can’t tell whether you heard me.” She stood and shook out her shawl. He heard the bucket scrape on the boards. “Do you dream?”
“No.”
“You hum in your sleep,” said Pei. “I hear it through the kitchen wall. It’s the same wall as ours, only thinner. Everything in here comes through to me, and I’ve got nothing better to listen to than your nonsense.”
“What do I hum?”
“I don’t know what it’s called. It climbs, and then it stops in the wrong place, and then it starts again higher up.” She hummed it under her breath, badly, the way she had hummed at the pots that morning, and stopped halfway, caught at something she didn’t want to be caught at. “That’s all. It’s not a song for the Deacon’s office. He’d have it stopped.”
Lin opened his eyes. Pei was already at the door with her hand on the frame. The lamplight lay across her face and made her look older than twelve, which she wouldn’t thank him for noticing.
“Stop counting when I talk,” she said again, not turning round.
“I’ll try.”
“That’s what I said you’d say.” She stopped with one foot over the threshold. “And cut a notch for the plum.”
“The plum isn’t a day.”
“Then cut one for the bucket. It’s had a long week.” She set the lamp down on the chopping block, where he could reach it, and left it there. The door was pulled to behind her but not latched.
He heard her cross the yard toward the kitchen. The cook’s voice met her at the step, grumbling about the lamp oil, and then Pei said something he couldn’t catch, and the cook went quiet. After a while the cook laughed, short and surprised, the way a man laughs when he has been caught being kind.
Lin lay down on the cot and turned his face to the door. There, the post stood on the far side of the planks. The lamp burned on the block and made a small room of light. He counted the notches with his eyes shut, from the top of the post down, the way he had counted them every night. One, two, three. He reached five and could feel the grain under his fingers, the old split in it. He reached seven. He was halfway through the eighth when he realised he had stopped counting.
He lay there and did not start again. It was new, and he let it be new.