Sect Year 0 · tenth month · night of day 11 · the second life: Mingchuan, her nineteenth year
The guilds bought the boiled-water trade that winter, and by the second spring the buckets had changed hands. Ninde watched it happen from her own gate. The guild carriers came up the lane in brown caps with barrels on their shoulders. Every bucket they sold was stamped with a guild mark and cost four times what a bucket of rain cost to boil on a dye-house stove. The red threads came down from the nails one by one. Some families pulled them down themselves and burned them under the cooking pot, so that no clerk would have to be seen doing it.
The rains came short that year. The roof barrel was half empty by the second month, and the vats stood cold on the dye-house floor, because nobody in the lane wanted blue cloth while they were coughing. Ninde went to the vats anyway each morning and wrung out what cloth there was. Standing still was worse.
Her mother coughed red into a rag at the basin one morning and did not get the rag away quickly enough. Ninde saw it. Her mother saw her see it, and folded the rag in two, then in four, as though a neat fold could turn it back into laundry.
“Back room,” Ninde said.
“I can still wring cloth.”
“Back room, Mother.”
The back room was small and smelled of the dye-master’s pipe and damp wool. Ninde lit the lamp and sat with her mother through the afternoon. She boiled the water on the stove and let it cool in a clay cup, and then she tasted it. Only after that did she lift the cup to her mother’s mouth. Her mother let her, and that was the worst part. Ninde had not known there could be anything worse than the cough.
“You do that every time,” her mother said between breaths. “Taste it first.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t let them tell you it’s the air, Ninde. It was never the air.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. You taste it, and that is not the same.” Her mother’s mouth curled at one corner, the way it used to when a customer tried to bargain over a bolt of cloth she had already dyed to the colour they wanted.
Ninde had counted Bao’s breaths in this same room, when she was seven. She had thought the counting would be easier the second time. It wasn’t. She sat on the stool with the lamp turned low and counted her mother’s breaths the way she had counted Bao’s, one. The next, and the next, until at the thirty-eighth the lamp guttered, and at the thirty-ninth there was nothing left to count.
She didn’t get up for a while. When she did, the rag was still in her sleeve, folded in four. She hadn’t known she had taken it. She carried it out to the stove and held it over the coals until it caught, and she watched it go, and she didn’t look away.
Her older brother took the fever a week later.
He had been carrying the settling jars out into the yard every dawn since their mother took to her bed, as though the notches might still matter. Ninde had let him, because it gave him something to do with his hands. Now he sat against the yard wall with a blanket round his shoulders in the heat of the morning, and his face was grey under the brown.
“Move them into the shade, Ninde.”
“They’re in the shade.”
“Then move them again.” He tried to laugh, and it turned into a cough, and the cough went on too long. When it stopped he pointed at the nearest stick. “I cut that one. Last night, before I couldn’t stand up.”
The notch was shallow and crooked, the cut of a hand that could not hold still. It was the lowest notch on the stick, and it was the only one that morning.
“It’s true enough,” Ninde said.
“Cut the next one true. You’re better at it.”
She sat down beside him in the dust, among the jars, with the water going grey and then clear in the sun. She held his hand while the light moved along the wall. He didn’t speak again. At noon his fingers loosened in hers, and the yard was very quiet except for the water dripping off the cloth lines.
She washed them both herself. She washed her mother first, and then her brother, with the cold rain she had boiled and cooled, and she didn’t taste the water she used. It wasn’t for drinking.
The guild had fenced the burial strip years before, with a plank gate and a clerk who kept a book. Ninde carried her family past it on a board and put them down in the soft mud at the canal’s edge, outside the fence. There, the bank gave way to reeds. She dug with the dye paddle. The blade was worn thin at the tip, and its handle had been polished smooth in two places. It had dug Bao’s grave when she was seven. Now it dug two more, and she didn’t stop when her shoulders burned, because stopping would have left the holes open for the water to fill.
She walked back up the lane. She counted the red threads on the nails, out of habit, the way she counted everything. Four were left out of the nine she had tied. Two of the four had gone grey with the rain, and nobody had come to take them down. That, she thought, was how the guild preferred to do its work: slowly, and in a way that no one could be seen doing.
“Don’t let them take the vat,” the dye-master called from his cot when she came back in. His voice was thin and far away.
“Nobody is taking anything, Old Master. Drink the rest of the rain.”
“Don’t let them.”
“I won’t.”
“Your grandfather laid that vat, you know.” The old man’s eyes were shut. “Forty years back, when the canal still ran clear to the mill. He used to say indigo does not care who is watching. It only cares whether you keep your hands in it.”
“He said that to you?”
“He said it to anyone who would stand still long enough.” A breath caught in his chest and came out again, slowly. “Keep your hands in it, girl.”
The hired boy had gone to the barges the week the cough came back. He hadn’t come up the lane since, to ask for his wages or anything else. So the last vat was hers.
She stripped to her shift in the yard and carried the cloth in from the line in her arms, the damp weight of it against her chest. The indigo was cold, but she put her arms into it up to the elbow anyway and worked the cloth down under the surface with her palms. Blue ran to her wrists and into the creases of her knuckles. It stayed there, and she didn’t scrub it off. When she lifted the cloth out, dripping and dark, she spoke to it the way her mother used to.
“Hold, you,” Ninde said. “You always hold.”
The cloth hung from the pole and dripped. It had come out of the vat green, the colour of pond weed, and as she watched the air turned it. Blue crept up from the hem in a slow tide, the way it always did, and within a few breaths the whole length of it was the deep colour her grandfather had been proud of. It was the only thing in the lane that changed without asking anyone’s leave.
Above her a bird went over the canal, and the sound of the water under the bridge went on the way it always had, because nothing in the city had asked it to stop.
At dusk a guild clerk waited for her at the corner of the cooper’s wall, under the lamp, with a purse on a cord. He wore the brown cap of the carriers and a clean collar, and he didn’t come near. He stood at the corner and looked at the blue on her arms.
“Five silver a month, dye-house girl,” he said. “To take the threads down from the nails. Nobody need object to it.”
“Somebody already objected,” Ninde said. “He is at the canal’s edge under a mat, and he can’t take your silver either.”
The clerk’s jaw moved. He untied the purse and counted out five coins on the top of the cooper’s wall, one at a time, in a row. Then he tied the purse back on his belt and left the coins where they lay. “Nobody need object,” he said again, more quietly, and went away down the lane.
Five silver was more than the dye-house had taken in since midsummer. Ninde knew the figure without needing to write it down, and she knew what it would buy. A sack of rice for the old dye-master, a measure of oil for the lamp, and a little more time before the vats went cold for good. She looked at the coins for a long moment, and she didn’t touch them.
She went up the back stair to the roof instead, with the blue still on her arms. She lifted the lid of the barrel she had set there in the autumn, when the rain had been plenty. The water was low, and it was still and clear. She filled a clay cup from the bottom of the barrel. There, the rain had been boiled and cooled and covered, and she drank it.
It was clean on her tongue. There was no grit in it, no iron, no flat taste of the canal. There was only water, cool and a little sweet, the way rain tastes when it has been boiled, cooled and kept covered overnight.
She stood on the stair with the empty cup in her hand and looked out over the lane, at the red threads still hanging from the nails and the guild lamps coming on along the bridge. She understood something she hadn’t let herself think before. It was the only clean water in Mingchuan she knew of.