Sect Year 6 · third month · night of day 29 · the fifty-eighth life: the schoolhouse, his thirty-sixth year
Forty children sat on the benches that spring. The stove smoked for the third morning running in the east wind, and the room filled with a sour, sweet smell of damp wood that got into the paper and stayed there until the ink dried. Ren Zhuo let it smoke. A stove that drew badly could still warm a room if the children were kept busy. He had learned in his first winter as master that a slate and a sharp question kept them busier than any fire.
“Who can tell me what the bend does in the rain?” he asked.
A hand went up at the back. It belonged to a girl who had come up the road in the autumn with her uncle’s cart and had not yet stopped asking whether the road would take her home.
“It floods, master. The carts go over at the lower turn.”
“Good. And what do we write when a thing goes over?”
“We write its name,” the girl said, “and then we write the road it went on.”
He nodded and let her sit. It was the right answer, and he hadn’t expected her to find it so quickly. The bench roll had been copied fresh that morning in his own hand. That was because the old roll had gone soft at the corners and no one else in the village could…
