Sect Year 0 · eleventh month · day 1 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court
The paper had come from the Elder’s pear-sweet box. Lin had flattened the lid on the woodpile the night before, smoothing the creases with the side of his thumb until the red characters ran in one clean line across the grain. Now he folded the sheet on a crate in the upper yard, and Pei held the tail string and told him to hurry.
“I am hurrying.”
“You’re folding it like a letter to somebody’s mother. Crease it. Don’t court it.”
“Kites are not courted.”
“Everything takes longer when you watch it.” She sat on the bottom step of the sparrow poles. There, the kitchen tossed the last spilled millet for the birds, and wound the string twice round her wrist. The sparrows did not come down while she was there. They sat along the crossbars and complained.
The upper yard lay above the kitchens, a flat patch of packed earth with the bamboo poles at one end and the cook’s drying racks at the other. From here the Outer Court’s roofs ran down the hill in grey and brown tile, and past them the valley opened out. The afternoon wind came up from the river in long soft pushes. Lin could feel it on his face before he could see it in the trees.
He tied the splints into a frame with kitchen string, broom-handle offcuts he had begged from the woodshed. The Deacon held that paper was for accounts, and nobody in the Outer Court had ever been told in writing that a kite was forbidden. Lin had not asked for it in writing. He had simply carried the splints out in the open. There, the Deacon’s runner could see them, and the runner had gone off without saying anything, which Lin took to be the Deacon’s answer.
He hummed as he worked. He didn’t notice until Pei stopped winding.
“That one,” she said. “The one you were doing with your mouth shut.”
“I wasn’t humming.”
“You were. It’s the same tune you hum at the pots. Where did you learn it?”
He creased the last fold and held the frame up to the light: a diamond of pear-sweet paper stretched over splints, with a red character showing at its heart. “A bridge-keeper’s wife sang it to a boy lying on a rail.”
Pei considered this. “Was the boy you?”
“He was somebody on a bridge.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the one I’ve got.” He tied the bridle, two strands of string, and tested the knot with his thumb. Then he tapped the bamboo spine, listened to its small clean note, and nodded. “You’re going to ask what it’s for.”
“Everything’s for something.”
“This one isn’t. It’s for the wind.”
“That’s no reason at all.”
“It’s the only one that doesn’t need a ledger.” He stood and handed her the frame. “Hold it up. Walk into the wind, then let it go.”
Pei walked, and the kite lifted off her hands like a bird deciding. The wind took it. For a moment it staggered on the cross-draft over the drying racks. Pei shrieked, and then the ridge wind caught the paper and it climbed, steady and proud, over the roofs and the sparrow poles and the grey slope of the north wall.
“Sing it,” said Pei, very quickly, as if she had been saving the request for the moment the kite was too high to be embarrassed by. “The words. Please.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“The Outer Court has ears like a pot lid.” He watched the kite climb. “I’ll hum the tune. The words are for somewhere with fewer cooks.”
“Then say the first line. Just the sound.”
He said it once, low, in the old tongue, the syllables soft and worn like river pebbles. Pei repeated them back to him, perfectly, with no idea at all what they meant, and he found he was smiling and did not stop.
Liu Mai came up the kitchen path with an empty basket on her hip and stopped at the edge of the yard to watch. She was the kitchen girl who scrubbed the iron pots until her knuckles went white, and she hadn’t spoken to Lin in a month except to say that the cook wanted the woodpile moved. She looked at the kite as if it were a thing she had been told about and had not believed.
“Can I hold the string?” she asked.
“No,” said Pei.
“You can have a turn,” said Lin, at the same moment, and Pei glared at him over the frame.
Liu Mai took the string in both hands and let the wind pull at it, and her face changed as the paper lifted. She didn’t shriek, as Pei had. She went quiet and tipped her chin up and watched the diamond climb until her neck ached, and when Lin took the string back she gave it up with reluctance and did not look at the basket on her hip again.
“It’s not much of a kite,” she said.
“It’s for the wind.”
“The wind doesn’t need one.” She shrugged, and went back down the path with the basket, and at the bend she looked back once, as though she meant to remember the thing for the cook’s sake and was not sure she would manage it.
Su Yanqing came along the lower path below the upper yard. She had a bundle of Inner Court papers under one arm, and her grey-blue sleeve was pinned back at the wrist to keep the ink from the cuff. She stopped where the path bent. She didn’t come up.
She looked at the kite for as long as it took to see it hang in the wind, then she took out the small black book, opened it against the bundle, and wrote with a pencil. She closed the book and walked on toward the Inner gate without once looking back at the yard.
“Is she writing about us?” Pei whispered.
“About the wind.”
“Nobody writes about the wind.”
“She does.”
His hands had folded paper like this before. He couldn’t have said for whom, or on what bridge, or in what century, and it didn’t matter. The crease had come up through his fingers as though it had been waiting for him to remember it, and he had let it. Nobody had asked the kite what it was worth. It simply went up, and came down, and was worth the afternoon it took.
The kite lost its nerve in the next gust. It slid sideways, dipped, came up again, and then the wind swung round and it dropped into the big pine by the outer wall. Its tail caught in the lower branches, and it hung there like washing nobody had come back for.
Pei groaned. “You said it would fly over the wall.”
“I said it would fly.”
“Are you going up?”
Lin looked at the pine. Once, in a life that was not his, he had climbed trees as easily as walking, and his hands still knew where every branch would take a foot. But the trunk was slick from the afternoon damp, and his left wrist still carried the sting from the morning, a bright tightness that came and went with each reach. He didn’t climb. He sat down on the crate and waited for the wind to drop.
It took most of the afternoon. The shadow of the wall walked across the upper yard and up the north side of the kitchens while Pei talked. She talked about the cook’s new rule on sleeves, and the Deacon’s wife’s cough, and whether sparrows could tell millet from rice. Lin answered the parts he could.
The notice was still nailed to the woodshed door. The Deacon had withdrawn it on the twenty-first, but nobody had come down to take it off, and Pei had not taken it off either. Someone had written withdrawn under the Deacon’s seal in pencil, and Pei read the pencil aloud in the voice of a clerk with a head cold, every morning, the way she had promised.
The last notch on the post at home had been cut the morning before, the thirtieth, and there would be no more. He hadn’t decided whether that was a decision or only the end of a count. He thought about it now, sitting in the heat off the drying racks, and found that he didn’t much mind which it was.
When the wind finally lay down, he walked to the foot of the pine, took the tail in one hand, and drew the kite down through the branches one twig at a time. There was not a tear in the paper.
“That took forever,” said Pei.
“It took the afternoon.”
“That’s what I said.”
“You’ll be thirteen in the eighth month,” Lin said.
“And too old for kites. The cook says so. He says I’m too old to sit on the sparrow poles and too young to be sensible about it.” She tipped her head back to watch the paper. “Do you know how old you’ll be?”
“I’ll be older.”
“That isn’t an answer either.”
“No,” he agreed. “It’s just what happens.”
She took the frame from him to look at the spine, turning it in her hands as if it might be wrong somewhere she could find. “Teach me the verse,” she said. “The first one. So I don’t hum it wrong.”
“I’ll teach it to you.”
“When?”
“After the masters’ night test.”
“When’s that?”
“They haven’t decided.” He held out his hand for the frame and checked the bridle while she gave it up. “They’ll decide it on a night when I’m asleep.”
Pei looked at him sideways. “That’s a stupid way to decide anything.”
“It’s the Inner Court’s way.”
Lin thought of the first verse, and of how the old tongue sat in his mouth like a stone carried a long way. Pei would carry it differently. That was the only reason to teach a verse to anyone at all.
“Then I’ll hold you to it.” She took the kite back from him and held it against her chest, the splints pressing through the paper, and she held it as if it might leave without her.