Sect Year 6 · third month · night of day 29 · the fifty-eighth life: the schoolhouse, his eighty-first year
By dusk the stove was only a warmth in the iron, and the room had given up the last of its light to the window. Ren Zhuo sat where he had sat for most of that winter, in the chair with the worn arms, the blanket folded across his knees and his hands resting on top of it. The hands did not hold anything now. They had let go of the brush some years before, and of the chalk, and last month of the cup, which Bai Tong had taken from him with a gentle, practised motion that neither of them remarked on.
Outside the glass the bend was white. The snow had stopped at midday and had not started again. The sky above the far ridge had gone the colour of a pewter spoon, and the light was draining out of it slowly, the way water leaves a basin. Ren Zhuo knew every stone of the wall that ran along the road’s edge. He knew where the frost lay thickest on the verge and where the wind pushed the drift against the bank. He had watched that wall through more winters than he could ever have chalked on a slate, and it had never once asked him for anything.
