Sect Year 2 · ninth month · night of day 14 · the twenty-fifth life: the valley under Silent Terrace, Ah Dong’s fifteenth year
The willows by the bridge went green at the tips first, as they always did. Then the bean rows broke the black earth in straight lines, and one morning the stream under the forge found its voice and carried it up the terraces. Ah Dong had heard the water come back four times now. He could name the season by its sound before he looked for it.
He worked the bellows that morning with one hand on the lever. Over the winter his shoulders had filled out enough to do the work his whole back used to do, and the fire came up to meet each squeeze at once. A bar lay in the coals. On the bench beside the anvil a sickle waited, its blade grey with old rust, and in his chest a question waited too, as it had through every frost since he was eleven.
Across the yard the teacher sat on the top step of the house with a stool beside him, a rag folded over one knee, and a clay pot of linseed at his elbow. The doorframe rose on either side of him, its posts worn to a low shine by years of hands. He was oiling it, as he did every spring, one long stroke at a time, and he hadn’t looked round since the first bean came up.
