Cold rain filled the cart ruts south of Cloudford. The old wharf had silted up. Reeds grew where the grain merchants used to stand. Since his last visit, the mapmakers had given the huts by the old Cloudford docks a new name, Lower Reed Hamlet. An old woman Pei Jing met on the road still called it Cloudford.
He went up the eastern ridge behind the kiln. Mud clung to the hem of his robe. Two crooked pines sheltered the flat gray stone at the head of his father’s grave. The grave looked out over the river, just as Su Mei’er had written. On his last visit he’d come up by the river and stopped at his father’s stone. This time he took the path behind the kiln, where two smaller graves lay just beyond the pines. The briars between them and his father’s grave had been cut back.
His father had died at fifty-two. He had checked the grain sheds that last afternoon and given Su Mei’er a message. By the evening bell, he had stopped breathing in his chair under the pear tree. To the left lay Old Zhang, a smith from Cloudford’s smelting yard. He had shown Pei Jing how to tell good steel from slag. To the right lay Xiao Yue, a stallholder who had traded him ginger for pine kindling when he was sixteen.
