Sect Year 0 · tenth month · night of day 11 · the second life: Mingchuan, her fourteenth year
The dye-house yard baked in summer. The flat stone slabs gave back the heat until well after dark, and the stone trough by the back door. There, the cloth was soaked, grew a skin of green that nobody bothered to scrape. Ninde set the jars out at dawn, before the sun cleared the roofs of the bridge alley. There were six of them, clay, each the height of her knee, each filled from the guild bucket to a finger below the lip. She stood them in a row along the sunny wall, and into each one she pushed a stick, a length of dyeing paddle-wood with the bark still on, so that it stood upright in the water like a reed.
By the end of the first week the jars had begun to speak. Grit fell out of the water as the sun warmed it, in bands, one layer under another. The lowest band thickened first, and the highest stayed thin. Ninde measured the grit line each morning with her thumbnail and cut a notch in the stick at the place where it had fallen. A notch a day. The sticks grew ragged with them, and the cuts were not all the same depth, because she was still learning to hold a knife steady. The stick in the lowest jar had been cut so often that it was little more than a stump.
Her older brother was sixteen that summer, and he had come home from the wagon drivers’ yard for good. The yard’s master had died of the fever in the spring, and his widow had sold the carts to a man from the upper quay and sent the boys home with a month’s wage each. He had grown long and quiet in the arms. He ate with his elbows on the table. Some mornings he carried out the jars before Ninde was awake, and some mornings he complained about it. But he always brought out the last jar, the one by the gate, because it was the heaviest and nobody else would carry it.
“Why the sticks?” he asked on the third morning. He was staggering a little under the weight of the lowest jar, which had a crack in its belly and was never quite full. He set it down in the sun beside the others.
“They’re a gauge.”
“For what?”
“For the grit. Each notch is a morning. Each morning I can see how far the grit has fallen and how fast.” She touched the nearest stick with one finger. “This one is the cloth-trough, from Mother’s washing. That one is the kitchen well. The guild water is the lowest. It falls like a stone.”
He looked at the lowest jar for some time. The grit in it was thick as paste, a grey band as wide as two fingers, and the water above it had gone faintly brown. “Does it fall faster than the others?”
“Every day.”
“Then the others will fall the same, once they’ve got the same grit in them.” He didn’t say it unkindly. “Ninde, what are you measuring?”
“How long it takes the guild to go wrong,” she said.
He laughed at that, the short surprised laugh he had picked up from the wagon drivers, and went back to the bench under the roof edges, and did not ask again.
Their mother came out at noon. She had a hand over her eyes against the glare, and she stopped short at the end of the row, looking at the jars and the sticks and the notches.
“The guild will have these in the canal by nightfall,” she said.
“They can have them.”
“They will. Take them in. Put them in the back room, where the clerks can’t see.”
“The clerks have seen them. Half the lane has seen them.” Ninde did not move. “Mother, come and look at this one.”
“I don’t need to look at it.”
“Look at it anyway.”
The argument went on for some time. Her mother’s voice rose and fell. Her brother said nothing from the bench, and the old dye-master’s cough came drifting out of the back room in long dry bursts. Ninde let her talk. When she had finished, Ninde knelt in the dust by the lowest jar and held up its stick so the notches showed. Then she took her mother’s hand, which was cold even in that heat, and pressed a finger into the grit at the bottom of the jar, and lifted the finger out.
The grit came away on her mother’s fingertip, grey and clotted, the way mud comes off the edge of a boot.
Her mother looked at it without speaking. Then she lifted the finger to her mouth and touched it with the tip of her tongue. Ninde watched her face while she tasted. It didn’t change. It only grew very still, the way it had gone still at the canal bank, and then it closed. Her mother took her hand back and wiped it on her apron and said nothing at all. She went back inside.
The hired boy had watched all of it from the gate. He was a barge-hand’s son of ten, whom her mother paid in rice to carry the buckets, and he was small enough that the wagon drivers’ boys had never bothered to tease him. He didn’t go back to his buckets. He stood with his back against the post and his eyes on the lowest jar, as if it might do something on its own.
The clerks came that afternoon. There were three of them, in brown caps and clean collars, and two carriers walked behind with poles across their shoulders. The one in front was a stout man with a ledger strap across his chest, who had sold the guild’s well-tickets at the gate since Ninde was small. He stopped on the far side of the bar and looked at the yard, at the row of jars in the sun, at the sticks standing up in them like a line of tally-marks.
“Guild water is guild property, girl,” he said.
“It’s the water we bought at your gate.”
“You bought it to drink. You didn’t buy it to keep in clay with sticks in it and carry it round the lane to frighten people.” He nodded to the carriers. “Take them.”
The carriers came forward. Ninde stood up and put herself in front of the lowest jar. One of the carriers looked at her, then at the clerk, and then, because the clerk said nothing more, he stepped round her and hooked the jar with his heel.
It went over with a dull knock, like a cough, and rolled. The water ran out across the flat stone slabs in a grey sheet, and the grit slid after it in a soft heap, and the sun caught in the spill and made it shine. The jar came to rest against the drain with its belly cracked and its mouth turned to the sky. The stick rolled into the gutter and lay there with its notches up.
Ninde went down on her knees. Nobody had told her to. She put her hand flat in the spill, and when the water had run back a little toward the drain, she gathered a pool of it in her palm and lifted it to her mouth. Grit, faint and gritty. Iron behind it. Under the iron, the flat dead taste of the canal bed at the height of summer.
“It tastes of the canal,” she said to the clerk.
“Get up.”
“It tastes of the canal, and you sold it to my mother by the bucket.” She stood. Her palms were grey to the wrist. “Go and tell the master so.”
The clerk’s mouth tightened. He turned to his carriers and jerked his head at the other jars. The carriers paused. Then the one who had kicked the first jar bent to lift the second, awkwardly, against his hip. The hired boy came off the post at a run and got between the carrier and the wall. The carrier stopped to look at him, a boy of ten with his arms spread out like a fence. Nobody moved for a moment.
“Leave them,” the clerk said at last. “Leave the rest where they stand. The council will want to see them in the hall, and it can count them there.”
They went up the lane in a line. Ninde stood in the yard with her grey palms and listened to their footsteps, and she didn’t sit down until they were gone. Then she fetched the stick from the gutter, stood it upright in the cracked jar, and poured in what water the bucket still held. That way, the stick would not dry out and the grit would have something to fall through.
That night, by the light of the lamp in the back room, she wrote the names on the dye-house wall.
She used a stick of charcoal from the cookstove. She wrote low on the plaster beside the door. There, the children could read it and nobody could paint over it without leaning down. The letters came out large and uneven. She wrote from the top down, the way a person reads a column, and she didn’t stop until the wall beside the door was filled to the height of her own shoulder.
Bao’s name was first. She wrote it in the top corner. There, the plaster was smoothest, and beside it she wrote his age: four. Then Hu Shen, the tinker’s wife from the lane behind the cooper’s, who had sung at her own door every evening until the cough made her stop. Then Hu Shen’s two sons, six and nine, who had been playing at the canal’s edge the week the cough came back up the lane. Lo, the boatman’s boy, who had found a copper in the gutter and laughed about it all the way to the bone-setter’s door. Then three from the bridge alley, two of them in one bed. Ninde wrote each name as she could still hear it spoken. She reached the bottom of her list she stood back and looked at the wall for a long time. Then, and the charcoal dust was on her hands and her cheeks and the front of her shift.
The old physician came to the gate in the evening, coughing herself. She leaned on the post with one hand, and her face in the lamplight was the colour of old paper. She looked at the wall for a while without speaking, reading it the way she read the labels on her jars. Then she turned and looked at Ninde.
“Mark the sick houses,” she said. “Separate the sick from the well. Taste every cup.”
“I do taste every cup.”
“Then do it where they can see you.” The physician coughed, a long dry rattle, and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “That is the whole of it, girl. There is nothing more to learn. Everything else is the guild hiding behind its ledgers.”
Ninde did not know what to say. She said, “Thank you,” and the physician laughed without much breath in it and went off up the lane with one hand against the wall.
The messenger came the next morning. He was a boy in a brown cap with the guild’s stamp on his sleeve, and he didn’t come into the yard. He held a folded paper out across the bar and waited with his arm stretched until Ninde took it.
She broke the seal in the sun. The letter was short and very correct. The council had received the matter of the dye-house girl, her jars and her wall. It would hear the girl in the guild hall, in her own person, once the season’s study had been completed. The letter did not name the season, and it didn’t name a day. Ninde read it three times. Each time it said the same thing, in the same clean hand, and then it said nothing more at all.
The seal was brown wax. It had been pressed so recently that its edges were still soft, and the ring that made the mark had not been used for long.