Sect Year 3 · seventh month · night of day 9 · the twenty-eighth life: Duanwei, the river quarter, his twenty-fifth year
The autumn flood came up the river in a single night and stood against the granary wall for three days. Ning spent all three on the new stones. He carried water from the tank by the scale-house, bailed the lower course where mud had crept between the joints. Then he walked the length of the wall at every dawn and dusk with his palm flat on the stone. He waited to feel whether anything had moved.
On the third morning Hu Wanqing came down the bank with her skirts knotted at the knee and found him there with his hand on the wall.
“You’re listening to it again,” she said.
“It’s a habit.”
“It’s a habit of a man who thinks a wall might answer him.” She stood beside him and looked up the course. The water had dropped back to the second stone. The wall had leaned toward the lane all through the winter before, and now it stood straight at the top, with the lean come back to where she had said it should be. “It didn’t go.”
