Sect Year 2 · first month · the twenty-third life: the Reincarnation Hall, Qiao’s tenth year
The refectory was a long low room beneath the gallery, with benches down either side of a plank table and a hearth at one end that never quite warmed the far wall. Supper was bread and thin broth in brown bowls, and the Hall ate it in near silence. The copyists murmured among themselves. The ink-boys did not talk at all, because the steward had said that a mouth full of bread could not be trusted with a count.
Qiao ate with his right hand. He kept his left hand flat on the bench beside his bowl, where it could practice being still. On the board beside the bread lay a page of left-handed characters, copied that afternoon and not yet dry. The strokes were still wider than they should have been, but they stood up on the line now, and Qiao was quietly pleased with them, and did not show it.
The Hall-Master had come down to supper that night, which he almost never did. He sat at the head of the bench with a bowl in front of him and did not lift his spoon. His hair had been combed since the morning, and someone had tied it back with a grey cord. He looked at the bread as though it were a page that had been copied wrongly.
