The back wall passed its test in the last of the rains.
Ren had done what the day book said. The room had aired its seven days. The seam above the wall had been tarred, on the first morning dry enough to climb. Then the rain had come again, a full week of it, and the wall had stayed dry through every day.
The sentence written for that room in the spring had been carried out to the letter — and the wall had answered it the only way a wall could: a full week of rain, and dry on the far side of it.
This morning he carried the first crate back to the low shelf. One crate. No more. Trust came back the way it had left — in steps, counted.
The front room had not waited for the back. The slate by the till told that story. The tea-stall woman's mother had taken her fever cure during the rain week, and on the Friday her brother's cart money had come in, and the slate had been paid and wiped clean. Three hundred ryō, counted into the till in wet coins.
The till was filling, slow and honest. The number at the top of the day book stayed where it was. Payments were made when the agent came, at the month's turn — not a day before, and not a ryō in passing.
The test came at mid-morning, on a knock he had not chosen.
That was the rule of it. His grandmother had kept the test all her life. Once in every month, on no named day, someone would mix the samples — so the nose could not study for it, the way a schoolboy studies for a lesson he can hear coming.
This month, the knock was Toma's.
Toma was the tea stall's boy, nine, maybe ten, with a solemnity too large for his frame. Mixing the test was his family's part of an arrangement older than he was. The tea stall sent tea to the shop on the first day of every season. The shop, in its turn, let the boy's hands be the honest hands of the test. He had no stake in what Ren's nose could or could not do. That was the whole value of him.
Ren lifted the reference cabinet down from its shelf. The cabinet was a low box of dark wood, and it held the shop's known-true samples. Jars bought from gatherers his grandmother had trusted for forty years. Jars she had checked herself, leaf by leaf, and sealed with her own wax. When the shop wanted to know what a true herb smelled like, it asked the cabinet. The shop did not sell from the cabinet. It believed from it.
Toma mixed the way other boys did nothing: slowly. He wrapped each label. He set each of the twelve jars down in a row and stepped back and looked along the row, the way a mason looks along a wall. Twice he moved a jar one place over, for no reason Ren was allowed to watch. Then he wrote the true order on a slate, in his round school hand, and laid the slate face down.
Toma had asked once, in the winter, why Ren did not mix the test himself.
"Because the hands know what the nose should not," Ren had told him. "If I set the row, some part of me remembers the setting. My nose would answer to please the memory, and call it knowing. Your hands owe my nose nothing. That is why they are worth a coin."
"Gran says the bed is a worse master than the fever was," Toma said.
"Your gran is up, then."
"Up, and cross about the porridge." The boy set his face the way he did when the test began. "Ready."
Ren worked the way he had been taught. Smell first. Then look. Then — only where the herb was safe on the tongue — a grain tasted, and time given for the taste to finish. A taste answered late, if you let it.
The first jar was plantain leaf, the broad ribbed leaf that grew by every path in the village. He knew it before the jar was fully open. Right.
The second was camphor, sharp as a slap. Right. The third was cool mint, clean and green. Right. The fourth was sourleaf, the summer leaf, tart as an unripe plum. Right, and noted in his mind for the hot months coming.
The fifth jar held a dark red root, cut in short pieces.
Ren smelled it. He named it at once. "Blood-stem."
Toma made a mark on the slate's back, and said nothing, which was also the rule.
The sixth jar held feverleaf. Ren smelled it twice. It smelled right at the front of the nose. He said so. "Feverleaf, true dried."
Another mark. No word.
The seventh was grey moss, dry as dust. Right. The eighth was woundwort, the rough-leaved plant for poultices. Right. The ninth was fever-bark, in bitter strips. Right. The tenth was yarrow tops, feathery and sharp. Right.
The eleventh jar held a pale root. Ren turned it in the light. Two pale roots lived in the cabinet, near as brothers. He chose. "Sunroot."
A mark.
The twelfth held bark, grey-brown, in curls. He broke a piece and tasted a grain. The bitterness came at once, strong and clean. "Ash bark," he said — and even as he said it, the taste went on changing under his tongue, slower and deeper than ash bark went. He had answered on the first bitterness. The late bitterness belonged to another tree.
Toma turned the slate over.
Eight marks of twelve stood in Ren's favor. Four crosses stood against him, and Toma read them out with the tact of a boy who has been told, at home, that laughing is not part of the arrangement.
The dark red root was red thread root, not blood-stem. The two roots differed in one place only: the smell of the cut face. Ren had named it by its whole smell, and had never cut it.
The feverleaf was feverleaf — but dried in a wet month, years back, and kept in the cabinet for this exact purpose. It smelled true at the front of the nose and sweet at the back. His grandmother had kept a liar in the cabinet on purpose. A nose that only met honest stock would never learn the smell of a lie.
The pale root was marsh root, not sunroot. And the bark was willow bark, not ash.
Ren stood with the four wrong samples in a row in front of him.
There was no shame in it that he could afford. A wrong name at the cabinet was a lesson. A wrong name in a fever room was something else. That was why the cabinet existed, and why the test came unannounced, and why the crosses went into the book beside the marks.
He opened the day book and wrote the result in full, the way she would have wanted it written.
The blind test. Eight of twelve. The misses: red thread for blood-stem. The wet-dried feverleaf. The marsh root for sunroot. The willow bark, answered too fast.
Under it, he wrote what the misses had taught, because a lesson unwritten was a lesson rented, not owned.
Cut the root before you name it. Let the taste finish before you speak.
Then he did the last part of the ritual, the part that was his own and not hers. He labeled the four wrong samples in his own hand and set them at the front of the cabinet, where they would meet his eye every time the box came down. The month's teachers, on the front shelf, where a teacher belonged.
Toma was paid for the mixing the way he was always paid, in a coin for his fist and a dried plum for the road, and he went out into the street with the plum already gone.
The test's lessons were spent before the day was.
In the afternoon, a widow from the lower street brought in a jar she had bought cheap at the gate market, off a traveling cart. The leaf inside was feverleaf, or near enough to pass at a market stall. Her grandson was warm in his bed. She wanted to know if the jar was true before she brewed it.
Ren set her jar beside the cabinet's feverleaf, and smelled both — the front of the nose, then the back.
"True leaf," he said. "But old. Dried hard, and kept long. It will make a weak tea. For a warm forehead, it will do. For a real fever, come to me, and we will weigh a cure off the shelf."
She thanked him and paid nothing, because the checking was never sold. It was how the street knew whose jars to trust. And the street's knowing was worth more to the shop than any coin the checking could have brought.
Ren put the cabinet back on its shelf. The shop was quiet. Spring light stood in the front room, and the first crate sat on the low shelf of the back, and the four teachers waited in the dark of the cabinet for next month's knock.
Eight of twelve. The number was in the book, where numbers lived. It would be better next month, or it would not, and the book would say which.
Before the shutter went up the next morning, he took the lamp into the back room and looked along the low shelf, where his one crate stood. Dry wood. Dry wall. The room was coming back the way trust did — in steps, counted.