Sect Year 3 · third month · night of day 17 · the twenty-seventh life: Thrice-Bend Ford, his thirtieth year
The crossing had held for ten years. The ford’s men were paid in salt now, not coin, and the salt went into the store-sacks at the middle bend and came out again in the lower houses. There, the rope-makers had built their sheds along the bank.
By the seventh year the sheds had grown into a street, with a tavern at its head where the boatmen drank salt-brandy and told one another the river was getting shallower, which it wasn’t. The women spun in the doorways in the evenings, and the children learned their letters from a clerk who had lost two fingers at the lower bend and could no longer work a rope. A bell hung on a post by the first landing.
Bai Shun had hung it in the second spring, with the salt-carter’s hands on the rope and his own hands on the post. Every morning since then a boy from the rope-makers’ houses had rung it for the first raft. The sound went out over the water before any rider came down to the bend, and it told the far bank that the ford was open and the count had begun.
