Sect Year 3 · seventh month · night of day 9 · the twenty-eighth life: Duanwei, the river quarter, his tenth year
The granary steps went down to the water in seven broad stones, and by the time Ning was ten there were children sitting on all seven of them. They came down from the river quarter in the mornings with their feet bare and their shirts tied up at the waist. They sat on the wet stone while the barges tied up and the grain came off them in sacks.
Nobody had told them to come. They came because the steps were out of the way of the clerks and the wagon drivers, and because the water made a sound there that was easier to think in than the sound of the scale.
Ning came down to them with a stick.
He had cut it from a willow by the water, and he had peeled the bark off so that it was pale and smooth in his hand. The mud at the foot of the steps was grey and fine, and when it was wet a stick could write on it, and when the tide came up the writing went away by itself. Nobody had to rub it out. Ning liked that about it.
