Sect Year 0 · tenth month · night of day 11 · the second life: Mingchuan, her seventh year
“Heal the city that drowned you.”
“Perfect Recall.”
The two lines arrived before dawn, in the dark of the dye-house, while she lay on the reed mat with her feet still blue from the vats. She didn’t know what a purpose was. Nobody had ever given her one, and the word had no shape in her mouth. What she knew was smaller and nearer. The vats steamed all night, and the steam gathered under the rafters and dripped on the sleepers. The canal outside smelled of iron. Her brother’s breathing was loud on the next mat. Her mother’s was quieter, and nobody’s breath had yet caught on anything.
The second line was the gift, though she didn’t think of it that way. It sat behind her eyes like a stone in a pocket, and it told her she would keep everything. Every grain of what she saw. Every word spoken near her, every cloth she had ever wrung out by hand. Whatever hurt her would stay as sharp as the hurt had been, and would not blunt, and would not go. She lay still and let the words settle, and when the first grey light came under the door she couldn’t have said whether she had slept at all.
By full day the dye-house was loud. Her mother had the first bundles on the poles, and the indigo in the big vat had gone the deep wet blue of the inside of a mussel shell. Ninde carried the stones. They were grey river pebbles with a hole through each, strung on cord, and they held the wet cloth under the dye so it wouldn’t float. Carrying them was her work. Laying them out was her brother’s work, and he was four, so he did it by dropping them.
“Ninde, what colour is the canal?” Bao asked, with a stone in each fist.
“Brown.”
“It’s blue.” He held one up to the light from the door. “Look. Blue inside.”
“That’s the stone.”
“It’s the canal,” he said, pleased with himself, and then he dropped the stone on his own foot. He didn’t cry. He looked at the foot with interest, then at the vat, then at Ninde, as if the vat had done it on purpose.
Their mother was down at the shallows with the rinsed cloth piled on the bank beside her. From the yard Ninde could see her sleeves rolled above the elbow, her arms red from the cold water and dark blue where the dye had soaked in. She was humming under her breath, a flat little tune with no words to it, the kind of tune a person hums without listening to herself. Their father had gone up the river on a grain barge at the start of the dry season. He would be back when the water rose again, at midsummer, if the barge held together. He had sent a coin tied in a rag twice. The coins had stopped in the summer, and nobody said why.
In the afternoon Bao sat on the step by the vat with his legs in the water to cool them. He had been quiet all morning, which was strange for him, and when Ninde turned round he was bent double, his small shoulders going up and down. Then the cough came. It was wet and it tore at something, and it went on so long that Ninde dropped the stone in her hands and ran.
Their mother came up from the canal with her skirts streaming. She knelt in the wet dirt and laid one hand on the boy’s forehead and kept it there.
“Hot,” she said. She didn’t look up. Her hand did not move. Ninde saw her face go still in the way a face goes still when it is counting something it doesn’t want to finish.
In the morning the cough had come up onto the cloth. Ninde saw it when her mother shook out Bao’s blanket in the yard at first light. There was a spatter on the wool, bright and not blue. Two doors down a boy the same size was coughing into his sleeve, and his mother was standing in the lane with her arms crossed, not going in and not going out.
“Take the big bucket to the guild well,” her mother said. She put a coin in Ninde’s fist and closed the fingers over it. Her grip hurt. “Boil it when you get back. Boil all of it, every drop, before anybody drinks.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.” Then, more quietly, with her eyes on the blanket: “Go on.”
The guild well stood at the end of the lane, walled, with a plank lid and a wooden grille at the gate and a warden sitting under an awning who took the coin without looking at her face. The bucket had an iron band round its rim and was heavier than she was. Ninde carried it home with both hands and her shoulders aching and did not spill a drop. She kept her eyes on the water and off the weight, and off the blanket, and off why her mother had said all of it in that voice.
The lamp was lit in the back room all evening. Her mother sat on the floor with the boy’s head in her lap and sang the tune with no words to it, very softly, over and over. Ninde sat on the other side of the mat and counted his breaths. She had counted the coins, and the stones, and the rinses, and it was the thing her hands did when nothing else was for them to do. She counted now. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Each breath came a little farther apart than the last, and the gaps between them grew, until she was holding her own breath to hear the next one come. Forty-four. Then there was no next one.
She went on counting after that. She didn’t know how to stop. She sat with her blue hands in her lap and her mouth moving. The numbers went on past the place where the breathing had been, and her mother’s hand came down on her knee and stayed there until the counting stopped.
They carried him out at first light. The guild had not yet put up its fence round the burial strip along the canal bank. So they went down through the reeds to the place where the mud was soft and the tide-line was pale with old silt. Her mother took the paddle. Ninde knelt and scooped with her hands and then with the tin cup from the kitchen, and the mud came up cold and grey and stinking of iron, and went under her nails and stayed there. She wrapped Bao in the mat with his feet bare and laid him in the hole she had made. He was lighter than the stones. He had always been lighter than the stones.
Her mother began to fill it in with the paddle. Ninde knelt with her palms flat on the wet earth, and on the third stroke of the paddle the mud gave a sound like a breath let out, and a door opened somewhere behind her eyes.
It didn’t come through any door she knew. It came from a place she had never been, and it had been waiting for her, and everything that came through it hurt at once. There was a spring with cold water running over stones. A grey stone above the water, with moss in the letters of a name. A jade slip, cracked clean across, its halves resting in a palm that was not hers and was cold to the wrist. A bridge, long and grey and humming with the river under its piers, and a man’s hands flat on its rail. A man’s voice in a courtyard she had never seen, saying the name of a sect. She had never heard that name in her life. She knew it as well as she knew the word for her mother.
There were two lots of memory now, one laid on top of the other, and both of them had weight. Perfect Recall kept every grain of the mud under her nails and every grain of the other things besides. She could feel the difference between the bridge and the canal as clearly as she could feel the cold of the bucket’s iron band. She couldn’t put them down.
“Ninde,” her mother said. “Come away.”
Ninde did not move at once. She was still kneeling, and her hands were still flat on the mud over her brother, and the cold had worked up into her wrists. Her mother’s voice had a crack in it that Ninde had never heard before.
“Come away now.”
She stood. Her knees were wet through, and her hands were blue to the wrist, and the grave was only a low mound of grey with a mat showing at one edge. They climbed back up the bank through the reeds with the paddle between them.
From the house behind the lane. There, the washing hung in the wet, a second cough started. It was small and dry and it came from a room Ninde knew very well. She stopped at the top of the bank and listened to it. She counted, because she couldn’t help it. Four, five, six, and then it caught and started again.
She understood, standing in the mud with her mother’s hand on her arm, that she wouldn’t be able to stop counting now. Not for the rest of her life.