Sect Year 2 · sixth month · day 11 · the rim of Sallow Basin
The salt-carter had taken off his boots. He had set them side by side on the crust a few paces from the bronze. He sat on the mud with his bare feet tucked under him and his back against a plate of cracked salt that had curled up around him like the lip of a bowl. His hat was in his lap. He turned it slowly by the brim, round and round, and did not seem to notice that he was doing it.
His hands were white to the wrist. The salt had got into the creases of his knuckles and stayed there, the way it did on men who had loaded sacks on the coast road for twenty years. Lin had seen hands like that on the carts that came up from the sea. He knew them before he knew the face.
“You’re the one who reads,” said the carter.
“Pei holds the wax. I read from it.”
“Well. You’ll do.” He looked at the hat, not at Lin. “I’ve not got much to give you in the way of a name. Gerit Lo. That’s the whole of it, and you can say it when it suits. But I’ve one other thing, and it isn’t my name. I want a message carried.”
