Sect Year 0 · tenth month · night of day 11 · the second life: Mingchuan, her seventeenth year
The guild hall was longer than the dye-house, the canal bank and the bridge alley laid end to end, and every part of it smelled of wet silk and old ink. Brown cloth hung from the beams in strips that stirred whenever the door opened. Ledgers filled the back wall to the rafters, each spine stamped with a guild seal in red wax. Ninde’s eye went along them and stopped at a number. Two hundred and eleven. The number made her stomach tighten.
The council had taken three years to find a day for her. Her six settling jars stood on the council table in front of her. She had kept them in the dye-house yard all that time, and each still held a notched stick standing in grey water, with the grit dropped through the water in pale bands over dark. She had carried them up the guild steps on a yoke, one jar at a time. Meanwhile, the porters watched and did not lift a hand.
Behind the table sat the guild master in brown silk. He was a broad man whose hands rested folded over a belly that had never once been hungry. Four council men sat on the benches beside him, and none of them looked at the jars for longer than it took to look away.
“You are the dye-house girl,” the master said. He didn’t say it unkindly. He said it the way a clerk reads a name off a bill.
“I am Ninde, of the dye-house.” Her voice went up into the timber and came back down to her. She had expected it to shake. It didn’t, and that surprised her more than anything else in the room.
“Mingchuan is drinking its own dead,” she said.
She didn’t look at the notes she had written. She didn’t need them. Perfect Recall held every name exactly where she had set it on the charcoal wall of the dye-house, and so she read them out in order, one after another, the way she would count threads off a spool.
“Bao, my brother, four years old. He played with the cloth stones until the cough took his breath. He is first on the wall.” She went on without stopping. “Hu Shen, the tinker’s wife from the lane behind the cooper’s. Her two sons, six and nine. Lo, the boatman’s boy, who drank at the guild well because it was the nearest. Three from the bridge alley, two of them in one bed.”
The hall had gone quiet by the time she reached the end of the wall. She read the last three again. The men on the benches had begun to shift, and she didn’t want them to forget that every name had been a person who lifted a cup.
Perfect Recall had a cost, and she had learned it at seven, kneeling at the grave on the canal bank. It kept the names, and it kept the coughs that came with them, every wet breath in its order. She couldn’t set one down. She stood in front of the guild’s council with all of them at once, and the weight of them, oddly, steadied her hands.
The guild master waited until she had finished. “The wells belong to the guilds, girl. We bought them with our grandfathers’ silver. Do you know what it costs to sink a well into sand?”
“I know what it costs to bury a child on the canal bank with a dye paddle.” Her fingernails were still blue, and she didn’t hide her hands under the table. “Cap the wells. Lay lead over the rings. Then sell boiled water at a fixed price at every gate. The money stays in the cups, and your guilds keep it. You only have to boil the water first.”
“Boiled water is for the rich.”
“Boiled water costs less than a grave.”
A man in a wet river coat rose from the far end of the bench. He had canal mud dried grey on his boots, and he didn’t seem to care who saw it. “The canal belongs to the city, master. The city dug it with the city’s labour. The guild has no more right to its water than I have to your bench.”
Three council men spoke at once. A fourth tapped his ring against the table, twice, until the others stopped. The master raised one hand, and the hall went still in the way a room does when silver is about to be counted.
“We will study the matter for one season,” the master said. “The council will decide at the next moon. Go home, girl. Boil your rain and leave the reckoning to the men who keep the books.”
Ninde looked along the ledgers on the wall. “By the next moon there will be more names on it,” she said. She rested her hand on the lowest jar. There, the grit lay thickest, and left it on the table. “Keep that. The council can taste it.”
* * *
Dusk had come down over the canal, and the lamps were being lit along the bridge alley one at a time. Ninde carried the spool in her sleeve. It was madder-dyed thread from the dye-house shelf, the brightest red in the city, and red was the colour the guild’s clerks could make out from the far side of a dark street.
At the cooper’s gate a woman opened the door with a child on her hip. The child’s breath rattled like a cart crossing stones. Ninde tied the thread to the nail, then set a bucket on the step, boiled rain with a wooden lid laid over it against the flies. “Drink from this bucket only,” she said. “Not the guild’s jars. Not the well. Not the cup a neighbour lends you.”
The woman looked at the bucket as though it might bite. Then she sat down on the step and cried without a sound, and the child reached down from her hip to touch the water with one finger.
Not every door opened. At the bridge a man told her through the crack that the guild water had been good enough for his father and would do for him. “Taste it,” Ninde said. “Then taste it again tomorrow.” He spat into the gutter, and the bolt went across. She tied her thread to his nail anyway. The thread was for the house, not only for the man in it.
By the end of the lane nine doors had her red thread on them. Ninde stood in the shadow of the well-cover and watched two guild men come down the lane with a lantern. They stopped under the cooper’s roof edges and looked up at the nails. Then they lifted their knives. They cut two threads and walked on, and the red lay in the gutter, bright in the lamplight, where anyone could step on it.
She walked home by the canal path. The dye-house was dark except for a single lamp in the back room. There, the old dye-master lay coughing on his cot. Ninde carried him a bowl of boiled rain and held it while he drank. He was too weak to lift it. When he had swallowed, his eyes ran wet, and he said, “Every porter at the guild gate has your name now.”
“Then they can say it. Drink the rest.”
“They’ll have the guild on the roof by the new moon.”
“Then the guild can climb. Drink.”
Her mother sat at the table by the lamp with a cloth half-wrung between her hands. She had heard all of it. The dye-house was built too thin for secrets, and the walls of the guild hall were thinner still. “You shouldn’t have said his name in there.”
“Which name?”
“Bao’s.” Her mother’s voice caught on the small word and steadied again. “They’ll use it against us.”
“They have already used it, Mother. They used it when they sold us the water.”
Her mother did not answer for a while. Then she lifted the teapot, poured a cup of boiled rain, and tasted it before she set it down. Ninde saw her do it, and said nothing either.
“Your father’s barge has not come up the canal since midsummer,” her mother said at last. “If the guild sends men, there is nobody on the bank to shout.”
“Then I will shout,” Ninde said.
In the morning the mist lay on the canal like wet cloth, and the threads on the nails were still there, most of them. Ninde went from door to door with the spool. Where a thread had been cut she tied a new one, three knots, and then a fourth pulled so hard it bit into the skin of her thumb. A thread tied by a dyer’s hands does not slip, her mother used to say of cloth. Ninde meant it of knots.
At the cooper’s the woman came out before Ninde reached the gate. The child was asleep on a pallet by the stove, and his breathing, she said, sounded like a bellows somebody had finally mended. “He drank the bucket dry last night. Bitter as anything.”
“Bitter is fine,” Ninde said. “Keep the lid on it and boil it again at noon.”
The woman’s mouth worked, as if she had a question and did not trust the answer. “The guild’s men came back at dawn. They asked who was drinking from the bucket.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That it was my water, and I would drink what I liked.” She looked down at the child through the open door. “Tie it properly while you’re here. Mine keeps coming loose.”
The dye-house door was last. She had tied its thread herself, and she hadn’t expected anyone to touch it. At noon a clerk in brown silk came up the path with a guild ledger under one arm. He stopped at the step, looked at the red thread, and tore it from the nail with two fingers. He dropped it in the mud.
Ninde picked it up. She wiped it on her apron, threaded it through the nail again, and knotted it. Then she set her weight on the cord and pulled. The nail groaned in the wood, and the knot held.
The clerk watched her for a long moment, the ledger tight under his arm. Then he turned and went back down the path, and he didn’t try the nail again. Ninde stood on the step with the cord still taut in her blue fingers and let him see that it would hold.