Sect Year 0 · tenth month · night of day 11 · the second life: Mingchuan, her ninth year
Two years on, the dye-house had grown poorer in the quiet way a house does, one thing at a time. The big vat cracked along a stave in the first winter after Bao, and her mother bound the split with wire rather than pay a cooper to replace it. The indigo lasted less long after that. The bundles on the poles grew thinner, and her mother began taking in mending from the lane. She sat at the back-room window with a needle between her teeth and a basket of other people’s shirts at her feet, and she hummed while she worked. It was the same tune with no words that she had hummed at the shallows the day Bao was buried. The coins from the river had stopped two summers ago. Nobody said why.
Her older brother had been at the wagon drivers’ yard by the upper quay since the spring before Bao died. He was eleven now and small for the work. He had been sent there to learn how loads were lashed onto a barge, because the coins from the river were already growing thin. He came home on rest-days with a copper in his fist and tar on his palms, and he ate whatever was set in front of him without looking up. On the other days Ninde missed him in a way she didn’t care to examine.
The guild had raised the price of its well water in the spring. The new figure was chalked on a board at the gate of the well-yard. There, the whole lane could read it, and beside the figure someone had drawn a small fish with a curl of tail. Nobody wiped the fish off. By midsummer the price had gone up again, the board had been chalked over, and the fish did not come back.
Ninde read the board every morning on her way to the vats. She couldn’t help reading it. Perfect Recall kept each figure exactly as it had been written, and by the second summer she could have set out the whole list of prices from the first year to the last without a single error. She kept the list anyway. Her mother said it was a waste of a good memory. Ninde said that was the reason for having one.
On the morning the rain barrel ran dry, she took the yoke from its peg by the back door. It was a plain ash bar worn pale at the middle, with a rope at each end and a bucket hung from each rope. It had been her brother’s before it was hers. Her mother did not tell her to go. She said only, “The pails are empty,” and went back to her mending, and the needle went in and out with a small dry sound.
The guild well-yard stood at the far end of the lane behind a wall the height of two men. The well-head had a plank lid, and the gate was a wooden grille with a stool set against it. The warden sat under an awning with a strong-box at his feet and an ink-stained thumb resting on its lid. He took Ninde’s coin without looking at her face.
“Two buckets,” he said. “Stand back from the rim.”
He turned the crank winch himself. The rope went down with a long groan and came up again slowly, the bucket knocking against the stone on the way. When it broke the surface it made a sound like a mouth closing. The water in it was grey. A rust stain ran down the iron band where the bucket had scraped the wall, and a skin of fine silt lay across the top. The warden tipped the bucket into her pail, and the silt slid off in a soft clump and sank out of sight.
Ninde looked at the water for a long moment. In her head she could see the same bucket two years before, the same iron band, the same wall. The water had been clear as glass when her mother lifted it. Bao had put his whole face into the pail to see the bottom, and come up with his nose wet and his eyes shining, and said the bottom was blue.
“It’s cloudy,” Ninde said.
“It’s the dry season. All the wells go cloudy in the dry.” The warden did not look at the bucket. “Next.”
“It wasn’t cloudy two years ago.”
“Then you were smaller.” He wiped his thumb on his trousers. “Taste it if you don’t trust it. The guild doesn’t sell poison, girl. Half the lane drinks from this well.”
She took the tin cup from the hook on the yoke and dipped it, and she held the water on her tongue for a count of three before she swallowed. Grit came first, fine as flour. Behind the grit was a bite of iron, faint and flat, like a coin that had sat in a fist too long. She hadn’t known until she tasted it that she had been waiting for the bite. She understood that she had been waiting for it since the morning she was seven.
Behind her a girl had come up to the rim with a clay jug. She wore a yellow scarf knotted under her chin, and she coughed while she waited, a wet tearing cough that bent her over the wall. When she straightened there was something on her lip. She wiped it away with the back of her wrist and spat on the paving.
“Not in the yard,” said the warden. He took up the long bucket-pole that leaned against the awning and moved the girl back from the rim with its end, not roughly, the way a man moves a sack that is in his road. “Next. Mind the lid.”
The girl went. Ninde carried the yoke out through the gate with grey water slopping in both buckets and the ash bar biting her shoulders. She didn’t spill. She kept her eyes on the cobbles, because looking down kept her from feeling the weight. Then the lane, the cooper’s wall, the tinker’s shuttered window, and the coughs.
She counted those too, though she hadn’t decided to. A man sat on his step and coughed into his elbow. A woman in a doorway coughed and did not cover her mouth at all. Two children in the gutter took it in turns, one and then the other, a game with a rule nobody had explained to them. By the time she reached the bridge she had counted nine. Her hands ached and her mouth tasted of iron, and she was still walking.
On the last stretch of the lane the cooper’s wife was waiting at her gate with an empty jug at her feet and a child on her hip. She had a narrow face and a way of looking at the yoke that said she had already decided what it cost. “Is it bad, girl?” she said. “Your mother said the well was sweet on rest-day.”
“It’s cloudy.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Ninde unhooked the tin cup and dipped it and held it out across the gate. The woman tasted, and her face folded like wet paper. “It tastes like the bottom of a pot.”
“Then boil it,” said Ninde.
The woman laughed, short and unhappy. “Everyone says boil it. My husband boils it every morning in the big copper, and the cough doesn’t care what we boil it in.” She handed back the cup without looking at it. “The rain barrel is dry on our side too. We’ve nothing else to drink.”
Ninde had no answer for her, so she said nothing, and went on up the lane with the yoke biting into her shoulders.
Her mother would not hear it.
“The guild would not sell poison,” she said. She was at the table with the mending in her lap, and she didn’t stop sewing when Ninde set the buckets down. “Everyone drinks it. The whole lane has drunk from that well for thirty years.”
“Bao drank it.”
The needle stopped.
Her mother’s hands stayed where they were, one sleeve drawn over a knuckle and the thread pulled taut between two fingers. Ninde watched them go still. She had seen them go still once before, at the edge of the canal with the mud soft under the paddle, and she had hoped never to see it again.
“Bao drank from the cup I boiled,” her mother said at last, very low. “Boiled water is clean. Everyone knows that.”
“Then why did he cough?”
Her mother did not answer. After a while she began to sew again, faster than before, and she didn’t lift her eyes from the shirt. The humming had stopped. Ninde noticed the silence the way she would have noticed a missing stone from a row of weights.
That evening, when the lamp was lit and the old dye-master had gone to his cot, Ninde took the cracked clay bowl down from the top shelf. It had a split along one side that someone had mended with pitch, and it had held the dye-house’s salt for as long as she could remember. She filled it from the guild bucket to within a finger of the rim. Then she set it on the doorstep of the back window. There, the moon would reach it, and she didn’t cover it.
She couldn’t have said what she meant to prove. She lay down on the reed mat with her blue-stained feet tucked under her and listened to the lane, where somebody’s child was coughing and somebody else was counting it. The count was not hers. It came from the next house, low and steady, a woman’s voice under her breath. Ninde counted with her until the voice stopped, and then she went on counting in the dark, because she didn’t know another way to fall asleep.
When the first grey came through the window she sat up and looked at the doorstep.
The bowl was there. The water had gone still in the night, the way the canal went still before the tide turned, and it had cleared from the top down. In the bottom of the bowl lay a fine grey layer of grit, the same grey as the mud at the canal’s edge. Above it the water was pale and clean. Between the two she could see a sharp line where the silt had dropped through the water, and stopped, and settled, and would not rise.