Sect Year 3 · seventh month · night of day 9 · the twenty-eighth life: Duanwei, the river quarter, his fifth year
The river market was held on the flat ground below the granary wall. There, the water left its mud when the flood went down. On market days the whole quarter came out to it. Boatmen laid their catch on wet leaves, and the potters set their jars in rows, and the women from the stalls at the scale-house gate bought their onions by the basket and haggled over every one. Ning went down with his mother on the first market day of the hot months, with his hand in hers and his brother a step ahead, counting the boats.
The bell-seller came that same morning.
He had a painted cart with two black wheels and a canopy of sun-faded cloth. From the front of the cart hung a bronze mask on a leather strap, polished so bright that it threw the sun back at the crowd in a trembling square. It had no eyes to speak of.
The brow was smooth, and the cheeks were smooth, and where a mouth should have been there was only a thin line, like a seam where two halves had been joined and then left alone. The bell-seller did not wear it. He hung it over the cart for show, and the children stopped at the cart and stared at it, and the bell-seller called to them in a pleasant voice.
