Sect Year 0 · tenth month · night of day 11 · the second life: Mingchuan, her seventieth year
At seventy her hands shook when she poured, so she poured with both of them, and the cup did not spill.
The second wave came in the fourth spring after the test. It came up the canal with the first warm rain and went along the bank house by house, and it didn’t stop at the red threads. By autumn forty houses on the canal side had threads on their nails, and nobody left inside them had the strength to take the threads down. Ninde went from door to door with a bucket on a yoke and a board under her arm. She tied her knots. She set the buckets by the steps. She slept little that year, and when she slept she dreamed of the lane with the water up to the sills.
It was the judge who capped the wells in the end, not the guild. He came from the prefecture in a sedan with four bearers and a clerk who wrote everything down. He stood in the guild’s well-yard with his sleeves pushed back while the masons poured lead over the rings. The guild master sat on a bench in the sun and said nothing at all. He had grown old on that bench, and his silk had faded to the colour of dust. When the last of the lead had set, he looked up and found Ninde at the gate.
“You said cap them,” he said. His voice was a wheeze now.
“I did.”
“Lead was the judge’s notion.”
“Then the judge is right as well,” said Ninde, “and you may tell him so.”
He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough that took him a long time to finish. She stood at the gate with a cup in her hand and waited. She tasted the cup first. Then she drank.
After the lead, there was only one seller of boiled water in Mingchuan that anyone trusted. Ninde set its price on a board at her gate: one copper a bucket, and a bucket for any house that asked, whether it could pay or not. The board was painted red, because red was the colour people could see from the far end of the lane. By the third year the lane below the vats had a name. People called it Ninde’s Lane. She disliked the name intensely. She let them keep using it, because a name was one more thing that would make people stop and read.
The girl came to the vats at twelve, with her mother dead in the second wave and nobody else to take her in. She had a wet cough that came and went, and a way of standing with her weight on one foot, as if she expected a shout at any moment. Ninde gave her a stool beside the dye-vats and a clay cup, and the first lesson.
“Taste it,” Ninde said. “Then taste it again tomorrow.”
The girl tasted, and wrinkled her nose. “It’s flat.”
“Good. Now the cup from the well, and then the cup from the roof.”
“How do you know which one’s sick?”
“You don’t,” said Ninde. “You taste it again.”
The girl frowned into her cup for a long time, the way a dyer frowns at a vat that has come up the wrong shade.
Ninde had watched the sickness for most of a lifetime, and she had come to understand the shape of it, though she had never found the words that would satisfy a teacher. It didn’t break a body the way a fall breaks a bone. It drained. It took the balance a body kept within itself, the thin even flow from the chest out to the hands, and a drained body went on living, thin and cold, with its channels still whole. That was the cruelty of it. Nothing was torn. The channels were only empty, and an empty channel that had not been torn could be filled again.
She had told no one that. She carried it the way she carried the cup, with both hands, and when the girl asked her the question again the next morning, Ninde gave her the nearest answer she had.
“If a body comes to you drained,” she said, “don’t rush it. Pour slowly, and carry the cup steady. Let it come back a mouthful at a time.”
“How long does it take?”
“As long as it takes. Carry it steady and slow.”
The carpenter from the bridge alley came in the second week of the autumn, carried the last twenty paces on his son’s back. His lips had gone the colour of slate. He had been drinking the guild’s water without boiling it, and now his body was as dry as a vat left out in the sun, and his hands would not hold a cup. The girl had never seen a drained man before. She stood over him with a clay cup shaking in her fingers.
“Slow,” Ninde said.
“It’ll spill.”
“Then it spills. Pour a mouthful, and wait.”
Ninde took hold of the girl’s wrist. She didn’t grip it hard. The shaking eased a little under her palm, and the first mouthful went in. The carpenter’s throat moved. For a time nothing else happened, and the girl’s face began to fall, and Ninde did not let go.
“Wait,” she said.
By the third mouthful the carpenter’s breathing had changed. By the tenth he was asking for his son by name. Ninde let go of the wrist then, and the girl sat down hard on the stool and cried without making any noise, as the apprentices always did. Then she wiped her face on her sleeve and asked for the next cup.
On a morning near the end, Ninde walked to the gate on her own feet, slowly, with a hand on the wall. The red threads had gone from the nails years before, and the board stood painted and clean. A child from the bridge alley was reading it aloud to two others, moving a grubby finger under each word. “One copper,” the child read. “A bucket. For any house that asks.” The others nodded as if they had been told it was a riddle, and then they ran off.
At dusk, on a day in the last winter she would ever see, Ninde sat alone at the vats with a cup of boiled water on the rim. The apprentice had gone home. The lane had gone quiet, and the vats were cooling one by one. The blue had dried on her wrists in the old way, and she didn’t scrub it off. She could no longer read the board at the gate from the stool, so she didn’t try. She knew what it said.
The apprentice found her that night in the house by the vats, in the back room. There, the lamp was low and the stove was warm. The lane had many people who would have come. She had asked them not to, and most of them obeyed, and the few who came late, because the people who loved her had learned long ago that she disliked being watched. She was respected, and she was alone, and she had chosen the second as much as anyone could choose it.
Nobody took the board down afterwards. The apprentice, grey at the temples by then, repainted the red every spring, and she never once lifted a cup without tasting it first and then tasting it again the next day.
Her last taste was boiled water. Under it, fading, was the iron of the old canal, the way a note stays in a room after the instrument has gone quiet.
honest
The physician’s way was hers in the end. The marking, the separating and the tasting lived in her hands and in her mouth, and they would stay there after the lane had forgotten whose name it bore. She had carried the other thing too, the drained body that could be filled. She had carried it for fifty years without a sentence to hold it, and she had handed it on in the only words she had, which were carry it steady and slow.
* * *
The taste of boiled water was still on Lin’s tongue before the bell rang, and for a moment he didn’t know which life it belonged to. Then he knew, and he lay still and let it settle.
The cup stood on the crate beside the cot. Someone had filled it from the kitchen jug while he slept and set it there, and he couldn’t remember who. He reached for it and stopped with his fingers a finger from the rim. He breathed in first, the way he had learned to, and then he lifted the cup and tasted the water. It was cool and clean and a little flat. It was only water.
He set it down again.
He sat up, and the blanket slid off his shoulders into the cold. Through the gap in the planks he could see the post beside the door. There, the notches ran in a line, eleven of them, one for each morning of the thirty days since the first. The twelfth morning had come. He took the knife from the crate, went out into the grey, and cut the notch at first light, and the cut was clean and true, and his hand did not shake on it. He stood looking at the new notch for a while before he went back in and put the knife down beside the cup.
Everyone in the sect had agreed the cold had broken his spirit veins. Three years ago he had agreed with them, lying in the dust of the duel ground while the Cold Ash ran through him, cold and fast. Now he turned the word over, and it wouldn’t hold its shape. A broken channel is torn through, and he couldn’t find a tear in any of the three that still answered him. What he found was a dryness. The channels had run dry, and nothing had come back into them. The fourth was another matter. It was shut, like a gate with its bar dropped from the far side, but a shut gate is not a broken one. An empty thing, if it hadn’t been torn, could be filled again.
He lay back on the cot in the grey light with his hands open on the blanket, and he understood it without any words for it. He didn’t yet know how to fill anything. But the emptiness was not the end of the channel, and the knowledge sat in him as quietly as the taste of the water did.