Sect Year 2 · ninth month · night of day 14 · the twenty-fifth life: the valley under Silent Terrace, Ah Dong’s thirty-first year
The years went down the valley quietly and all at once, like water in a dry season. Ah Dong did not feel most of them pass. He felt the bellows split and be patched, and patched again, until the leather was more cord than skin. He felt his knuckles widen and his palms harden. He marked the seasons by the bean rows and the floods and the sound a bar made as it cooled, and by no other count.
The valley brought him broken tools. Hoes split at the eye, sickles with cracked heels, a plough-share bent by a stone in the furrow, a child’s spade with its handle gone soft with rot. He took each one and waited for it the way he had been taught, and he didn’t hurry the iron for anyone. The old men at the bridge said the forge had a steady hand. They meant it as thanks.
The bridge was rebuilt that year, when the spring floods had worn its footings down to the bare stone. The carpenters came up from the lower road with their saws and their wagons of pine. They took the old rail down a length at a time.
