Sect Year 2 · eleventh month · day 4 · the Qingliu fork post-house, the back room by the window
He had carried his things into the back room on the second morning. That was because the front room had the stove and the carriers and no table that was not under somebody’s bundle. The back room had a plain board table under the window, a stool with one short leg that he had propped level with a folded rag, and a view down over the fork.
From the doorstep he could see the yard, the stable roof white along its ridge, the tin lamp above the gate, and beyond the gate the river running low and loud over its stones where the east road and the south road parted.
Two days he had sat at that table with the Deacon’s coarse grey paper in front of him and Su’s pen in his fingers. Two days he had written nothing that was not a line struck through a line.
On the morning of the fourth day he tried the right hand first. It was the steadier of the two. It had been steady since the Core opened in the Wastes. It had never once refused him a stroke of ordinary writing, only the answers.
