Sect Year 0 · tenth month · night of day 11 · the second life: Mingchuan, her twelfth year
The river fell through the dry season until the barges stopped coming up past the bridge. By the first frosts the canal was a line of pale sand between two banks of cracked mud. The few boats that still tried it stuck a bowshot short of the locks, their crews wading ashore with their trousers rolled. Ninde watched them from the bridge alley with the yoke on her shoulder. Nobody had dredged the canal in her lifetime. Her grandfather used to talk about the year the water came up to the mill steps, and she had never believed him. Now she could see the mill from the bridge, a black hulk on a dry bank, its wheel standing still.
With the canal gone there was nothing to drink near the dye-house but the guild’s wells. The household drew from them because there was nothing else. Her mother carried the buckets and Ninde carried the yoke. The old dye-master complained that the rinse-water tasted of pennies, and drank it anyway. He had worked her grandfather’s vats for thirty years and had never once been asked to leave them, and he didn’t intend to be asked now. He was small and bent, his hands stained to the wrist, and he could no longer lift a full cloth on his own. Ninde lifted it for him.
The first child in the lane to die that winter was the boatman’s boy, Lo, though he wasn’t the first to cough. He was eight, thin and loud, and he had sold eels at the bridge until his hands were grey with the slime. The cough had not made him quiet either. He came up the lane one morning coughing and laughing at once, because he had found a copper in the gutter below the guild wall and nobody had got to it first.
By evening he was coughing blood into his mother’s apron.
Ninde saw it. She had carried a bowl of guild water to the boatman’s door, boiled hard in the dye-house pot, because the boatman’s wife had asked for it. She stood on the step with the bowl in her hands while the woman screamed the boy’s name into the lane. The woman ran with him on her hip to the bone-setter at the bridge end. Ninde ran behind, still holding the bowl, because she didn’t know what else to do with it.
The bone-setter’s shop had a board nailed beside the door. Its letters were black and square, and they said FEE FIRST. The bone-setter opened the door a crack and looked at the boy through it, then at the mother’s empty hands, then at Ninde’s bowl. He shook his head once. The door shut. Lo’s mother stood on the step with the boy’s weight dragging at her arms and said nothing at all, and the boy’s breath whistled between them like a reed in a draught.
They carried him home. Ninde sat with him in the boatman’s back room until the lamp was low, counting his breaths, and she didn’t stop until the count stopped. She didn’t sleep that night. At dawn she sat on the step with her hands in her lap and tasted the bowl she had carried. It had been boiled hard, and it still tasted of the canal. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to pour it away.
They buried Lo two days later. The guild had fenced its burial strip by then, a head-high wall of new planks with a gate in it, and a clerk sat inside the gate with a ledger open on a frame stand. He wrote the boy’s name in the book. He asked for the father’s name, and the boatman’s wife gave it, and he wrote that down too. Then he asked whether the family had paid the strip fee. The boatman’s wife said nothing. The clerk turned a page and did not write anything else. They carried Lo past the gate on a board, with Ninde at the head of it, and they went down the bank and buried him outside the planks, in the reeds. There, the mud was soft and nobody had been asked for a copper.
In the dry weeks after that she walked the old canal bed behind the guild wall before the guild’s carriers came up the path. The bed was a long white trough of sand, scored with the tracks of carts that had given up on it. At its centre. There, the water had once run deepest, the guild had sunk its wells. Each one was a ring of cut stone, and every ring had cracked and gone unpointed, so that sand poured in under the edge in slow grey threads. The ground around the rings stayed wet and cold even under the summer sun. It smelled of iron.
She knelt by the nearest ring with her skirts tucked under her and watched a thread of silt run into the sand. Then she put a finger into it and tasted. It was the taste of the cup in the lane: grit, and iron, and under both something flat and dead, like the bottom of a jug left out overnight.
On the fourth morning she went to the market. It stood where the bridge alley widened into a square, and an old woman sold remedies from a board laid across two barrels. She wore a grey shawl and had a cough of her own that she didn’t trouble to hide. Her wares were dried roots, scraped bark and small clay jars with paper stoppers. Ninde had seen her before. Everyone in the lane had, once or twice, when a child was sick.
Ninde set the guild bowl down on the board. It held the grey water she had drawn that morning from the ring by the wall.
The old woman tasted it first with her lips and then with the tip of her tongue, the way a cook tastes a sauce. She nodded slowly. A sum had come out the way she had feared.
“Silt,” she said. “From the old bed. You can taste it if you’re patient.”
“What does it taste of?”
“Flat. Dry. Like chalk stirred into a cup.” She set the bowl down. “Taste it, then taste it again tomorrow, and you’ll know.”
“How do you know what the sickness is?” Ninde asked. “The cough, I mean. How do you know it’s the water?”
“I don’t.” The old woman coughed, a small dry sound, and wiped her mouth on the end of her shawl. “I taste it again.”
Ninde waited for more. There was no more. The woman took the bowl back, poured the silted water out onto the cobbles, and refilled it from one of her own clay jars, which was clear. “Now you know what clear tastes like,” she said. “Go home and taste the difference yourself. It goes in better that way than through the ears.”
Ninde carried the clear bowl home with both hands and set it on the table in front of her mother.
“Taste that,” she said.
Her mother looked at the cup and then at her. She didn’t reach for it. “Ninde, you’ll have the guild at the door.”
“Taste it first. Then tell me it’s fine.”
“The guild hears everything through the walls.”
“Then let them hear it.”
“Hush.” Her mother said it sharply, and her voice shook on the last of it. She looked toward the back room. There, the old dye-master was dozing on his cot with his mouth open. “Hush, girl. He’s sick enough without being frightened.”
Ninde lowered her voice, but she didn’t stop. “The wells are in the sand. The rings are cracked, and the silt comes in under every stone, and the children drink it at the rim. Lo drank it. Lo’s mother has his blood on her apron, and the bone-setter shut his door on her for want of a copper. We are drinking the wells, Mother.”
Her mother’s eyes filled. She didn’t wipe them. She took up the bowl and held it in both hands for a while, and then she set it down again without tasting it, and turned back to the mending. The needle went in and out. After a while she began to hum, the tune with no words, and then she stopped in the middle of a line as if she had remembered something she didn’t want to.
From that day Ninde tasted every cup in the house before anyone else drank from it. She did it at the table and at the stove and at the vat. There, she lifted the ladle from the clay pail and took a sip of whatever was in it before she let anyone near the cloth. Her mother saw her do it and said nothing. After a while Ninde noticed that her mother had begun to wait for her, with her own cup held in both hands, the way a patient waits for a physician to finish looking at the tongue.
On the way back from the market she took the long way round the guild wall. In the gutter below it. There, the sand came down from the old bed in a thin silted fan, she found a rag stained red and a clot of sand lying beside it. She crouched and looked at them. The rag had been used to wipe a mouth, and the stain had dried in a rim, the way dye sets on linen. She didn’t touch it.
She took a stick from the gutter, pushed it into the sand at the foot of the wall. Then she cut a notch in its side with her thumbnail, at the height where the silt line had dropped. She didn’t know yet what the notch was for. She knew only that a thing measured was harder to argue with than a thing remembered. Then she stood up and went home by the canal path with a plan she couldn’t yet say aloud.