Sect Year 0 · tenth month · night of day 11 · the second life: Mingchuan, her twentieth year
She began the test in the hottest week of summer, when the canal sank so low that its floor showed through in cracked grey plates and the stink came up off the mud by midday. Ninde set the rules on a board by the stove before the sun was over the roofs. There would be three people in the dye-house and three cups on the table. Every cup would be boiled rain from the roof barrel, boiled once at dawn and kept covered until noon. The guild water would go into the jars for washing and for nothing else. No one was to lift a cup to their mouth until someone else had tasted it first.
“Nothing to drink, then,” said the hired boy, reading the board over her shoulder. He had come back from the barges in the spring with a bruise on his cheek and no wages, and he had been sulking since.
“Rain,” Ninde said.
“Rain tastes of nothing.”
“Then it won’t hurt you.”
The old dye-master had come through his fever thinner than he went in. He sat at the end of the table with both hands round his cup, as though he were warming them at a fire in the height of summer. He didn’t argue. He waited until Ninde had tasted, and then he drank all of it.
The first morning the hired boy spat his cup into the yard. “Bitter,” he said. He was sixteen or so, long in the arms, with a dye-stain on his neck that he had never quite scrubbed away.
“Drink it anyway.”
“It’s bitter.”
“Boiled rain is bitter. Guild water is bitter too, in its own way. You drank that for two years and never once asked why it tasted of the canal.” She poured him another cup and held it out until he took it. “Drink it, and then tell me what you taste.”
He drank. He made a face at the bottom of the cup, and then, slowly, he stopped making it. “Nothing,” he said at last. “It tastes of nothing.”
“Good,” said Ninde, and she wrote the date on the board.
Each morning after that she carried the stool out to the step and sat with a cup of her own, and she watched the lane. The same air came down the alley from the bridge. The same stink lay on the same mud, and the same cough went up and down the doorways, passing from one house to the next before the sun was high. Ninde counted it. She couldn’t help counting. Perfect Recall kept each cough for her, and she could hear every one of them as clearly as if she were still standing in the guild hall.
Four households on the alley had come to the dye-house gate in the spring for the red-thread buckets. They paid in eggs and in scraps of cloth, and once in a pot of plum jam that the hired boy ate before anyone could stop him. Ninde had counted those households too. On the fifth day the cooper’s youngest stopped coughing in the night. On the sixth, the widow at the end of the row stopped as well. By the end of the week two of the four were quiet. The cooper’s wife came to the gate at dawn with her hands pressed over her mouth, as if she had said something she should not have.
“He slept through,” the woman said. “All night. He hasn’t slept through since the spring.”
“Keep the lid on the bucket,” said Ninde. “Boil it again at noon.”
“The others on the row are asking what we did.”
“Tell them to taste it.”
Not everything went the way the board said it would. On the third day a boy from the far end of the alley, one whose name Ninde had never learned, died in the night before anyone could carry a bucket to his door. She heard the women wailing from the stool and sat with her cup going cold between her hands. She hadn’t been able to reach him in time. Nobody had asked her to, and she hadn’t known he was there to be reached. She wrote him on the board anyway, below the three, as a mark and a date, in the place where the sum was kept. The board had no column for him. She made one, and the hired boy watched her do it and did not complain about the ink.
On the sixth day a guild clerk came up the lane with two carriers behind him. He was a thin man with ink on the side of one finger, and he had been sent, he said, to look into a rumour. He stopped at the gate and looked at the dye-house, at the threads that still hung from the nails and the bucket on the step, and then at Ninde on her stool.
“The dye-house girl is selling water,” he said.
“I am giving it,” said Ninde. “I don’t sell it.”
“Then let me taste what you’re giving.”
She poured him a cup from the morning’s boiling, cooled and covered, and handed it through the gate. He tasted it, and then he frowned and tasted it again, the way she had taught the hired boy to taste. His brows came together.
“It tastes of nothing.”
“Yes.”
“How do you get rain in a dry summer?”
“From the roof.”
He looked up at the roof. There, the barrel stood in the sun with its lid on. Then he snapped his fingers, and one of the carriers came forward with a clean clay cup and a guild bucket slung from a pole. The clerk filled the cup from the bucket and tasted it, and his face shut like a door. He spat onto the cracked mud beside the gate.
“Iron,” he said.
“Silt,” said Ninde. “And iron.”
“I am not paid to taste iron.” He wiped his mouth on his cuff, and his eyes went to the board that Ninde had propped against the gatepost to dry in the sun. He read it slowly, his lips moving on the words.
She had written it plainly, because the council would need to understand it without a teacher. A week. Three in the house, and nobody ill. The same air as the alley, the same street, the same mud on the same boots. So the water is the difference. Below it she had signed her name, and her mark, and under the mark, in smaller letters, the words of the dye-house.
“The master will want this,” the clerk said.
“The council will have it,” said Ninde. “In writing, under my own mark, the same as the one on the board. You may copy it into your book.”
“The master sent me to fetch it back to the guild hall.”
“The board stays on the gate. Anyone who wants to read it can stand in the lane and read it.” She folded her hands in her lap. “If it goes into the guild hall, it goes on a shelf, and nobody will find it when the wells need capping.”
The clerk looked at her for a while. The carriers shifted their weight, and one of them glanced at the bucket on the pole as if he would like to throw it into the canal. Then the clerk opened his satchel and took out a ledger with a cracked leather cover. He stood at the gate with the book on the bar and copied the board word for word. It took him most of the morning. Ninde brought him a cup of boiled rain halfway through, and he drank it without tasting it, and he didn’t spit.
When he had finished he closed the ledger. He didn’t thank her. He didn’t spit again, either. He went back down the lane with his carriers, and every few steps he stopped and looked at the threads on the nails.
That evening the hired boy sat at the table and wrote the day’s count under hers on the board, in a careful hand that Ninde had taught him, with the letters bigger than they needed to be. Three in the house. Nobody ill. He looked up. “Is that enough?”
“It’s true,” said Ninde. “That is enough to begin with.”
The old dye-master laughed at that, once, and then coughed, and then laughed again, quietly, so as not to wake the lane.
Later, with the lamp turned low, the hired boy sat down on the step beside her. He had been expecting her to send him back to the barges since the spring, and he had said nothing about it, and now he said it. “Why did you let me come back?”
“You came back.”
“The barge captain docked my wages for a broken oar. It wasn’t mine.”
“Then you came home owing nothing.”
He turned his cup round in his hands. “I came home because you pay in rice.”
Ninde did not laugh, though she wanted to. “Then you’ll taste the rain again in the morning.”
“Yes,” he said. “Taste it, then taste it again.”
When the house had gone to sleep she sat on the back step with a clay cup of the morning’s rain, and the night came down close and warm around her. The canal gave off its summer stink from below, but the air over the lane was thin enough to breathe. She held the cup in both hands and looked into it. The water was still. There was no wind to disturb it, and the moon was low behind the bridge. In the surface a face looked back at her. Her own, twenty years old, with the lines at the mouth that had come from tasting, and a tiredness round the eyes that had not been there when she began. She was twenty years old, and she had been a dyer’s girl for all of them, and she had spent more than half of them standing at a gate.
She didn’t put her hand in the water. She let the face stay where it was, and when she lifted the cup and drank, the face went with it. The proof was on the gatepost now, and the lane would read it in the morning.
She thought, with the cup cool in her hands, that she was going to be a long time at this.