The bell woke him before the shouting did.
The gate bell did not ring at night for small things. It rang for fire, and for nothing else after dark. Ren was down the stairs with his shirt half on, and the smell reached him at the door — wood smoke, and under it the hot smell of oil.
His grandmother's rule for bell nights stood in his hands before it stood in his head. Light the shop. Set water on. Open both doors. A lit shop with full shelves was where the street brought its hurt, because the street knew the way there in the dark.
He lit the lamps. He set the kettle and the big pot on the stove. He hauled the washed drink crocks in from the back step and filled them at the well — cool water, standing ready in a row. Then the shouting came up the street, and under the shouting, feet.
The timber warehouse by the gate sheds was burning at its far end. A jar of lamp oil had gone over in the loft, they said, and the loft had lit before the watch could climb to it. The sheds' men had got the horses out and the carts clear. What they could not get clear, they carried — and they carried it to the light.
The foreman came first, half dragging a shed man whose hands had gone into the fire to pull a mate back from the loft ladder. The hands were red and blistering, small burns, clean-edged. Ren sat him down by the crocks and put his hands into the cool water and kept them there.
"Hands in until I say out," he said. "Water is the first medicine tonight. It costs nobody anything."
They came in a stream after that, the way the hurt always came — in the order the fire had finished with them.
A shed man's forearm, cut long by a burst jar, bleeding steady. Pressure first, a clean cloth pressed hard, his own hand taught to hold it while Ren bound it, then powder.
A carter with the smoke in his eyes, weeping and blind for the moment. Water across the eyes, again and again, until he could see the lamp.
The rope-maker, who had twisted his ankle in the dark yard and gone down under a carried beam. Ren felt along the bone with care. No break that his fingers could find. A splint, bound above and below, and the man set on a crate with his foot up on a sack.
A dyer's boy with a cut across his palm, from glass he never saw. Washed. Powder. Bound.
The tea-stall woman came with water from her own well and burned her palm on a bucket handle still hot from standing near the sheds. Ren dressed it with salve and sent her back for more water, because work was a medicine for the frightened too, and her hands could still carry.
The warehouse clerk, whose sleeve had caught and burned away up one arm before they beat it out. A long red burn, weeping. Cool cloths, laid and changed. Salve on the worst of it.
A cart boy with a knee opened on the yard stones. Washed clean. Powder. Bound.
And an old shed man, grey with smoke, who could not stop coughing. Ren sat him by the door, in the clean air, upright, with a cup of warm water, and watched him until the cough loosened and his color came back.
Nine, by the time the stream thinned. Nine names going into the night page of the day book as fast as his hand could write between one hurt and the next — what it was, what he had done, and the watch's call that stood nearest it on the night. A note that did not say when was only half a note. His grandmother's rule, and the hospital's need, and the same thing.
The two the shop could not keep came in the middle of the stream, and the book gave them their own lines.
Genji the night watchman had been first up the loft ladder, before the oil jar went. The fire had taken him across the face and the chest as he came down, and his hands had burned holding the rail. His face was under the worst of it. And when he tried to speak, what came out was a hoarse whisper that tore as it came.
Ren laid cool cloths on the burns and changed them as fast as they warmed. He put nothing on the face but clean cloth and water. A voice torn by smoke could be a throat closing in the dark, and a throat was past his plants and past his shop. That was the hill's work, and quickly.
"Do not wait for the cart," he told the foreman. "Litter. Now. Four men and no jolting."
He wrote the note standing at the counter with the cloths still dripping on the floor. What he had done. What he had not done. The watch's call when Genji had come in, and the call when he went out. He folded it into the watchman's own sash, where a doctor's hand would find it, and the litter went up the hill at a run-walk in the lamplight.
Tai, the foreman's nephew, had gone off the loft ladder when the beam above it gave. He had fallen the height of the loft onto the yard, and now he lay on the plank door they had carried him in on, and he did not want to be moved, and said so with his teeth shut.
Ren put his hand on the boy's belly, light as a leaf. Hard, the way a belly should never be hard. The pulse at his wrist ran fast and thin. Pain when he breathed deep. Nothing broken that the fingers could find — and no need to find it. What was wrong with Tai was inside, where no plant and no powder of this shop had ever reached, and moving him wrong could finish what the fall had started.
So they did not move him. The plank door stayed where they had set it down, by the counter, out of the stream's way. Ren covered him with the shop's blankets to the chin. Warmth was his. Stillness was his. Nothing to drink. He wrote it on the note in letters that stood up: nothing by mouth, not even water. And he sat by the plank in the gaps of the work. He watched the breathing. He wrote what he saw, under the watch's calls as they passed.
"The hospital cart, when it comes for the clerk's arm," the foreman said.
"The hospital itself," Ren said. "Send a runner. Tell them a fall, a hard belly, a fast pulse, and a boy who must be carried flat, and slow, and never tilted, not even for the hill's slope. Tell them to bring hands that know how."
The runner went. The night went on around the plank door. The coughing man slept sitting up. The water in the crocks went down and was filled again. Twice Ren changed the cloths on the burns of the men who waited, and worked the salve thin where the skin had blistered worst, and twice he wrote it, with the calls.
The doctor came a little before the dawn thinned, with the hospital's cart and four carriers, and he came into the shop the way weather comes into a room — all at once, and looking at everything.
"Andō," he said, to no one in particular. "The hospital. Who kept the book here?"
Ren put the night page in his hand.
Andō read it standing, in the lamplight, with the carriers waiting at the door and the boy breathing on the plank at his feet. He read it the way a man reads a map of ground he is about to walk. Twice his eyes went back up the page. Once he looked at the plank, and once at the crocks, and once at the men asleep on their crates.
"You wrote what you did not do," he said.
"What I did not do is half of what you need to know," Ren said.
"Most men write the doing and hide the rest." The doctor folded the page into his own sleeve, next to a folded note in the same hand — the one that had gone up the hill in the watchman's sash. "The watchman is on the hill. His throat holds, for now, because he went up when he went up and not an hour later. This page told us what had been cooled, and when, and what had been left alone — so nothing was done twice, and nothing waited to be done at all." He looked down at Tai. "Now. We carry him like a full bowl. Show me how he lies."
They took the plank up on six hands, the doctor walking at the head with his own hand light on the boy's chest, counting the breathing aloud for the carriers to walk by. The cart went up the hill at a walk, in the first grey, with both of the night's pages in the doctor's sleeve.
When the street had gone quiet, Ren barred nothing and locked nothing. He sat at the counter with the day book and finished the night's writing while the ink of the last lines was still wet in his memory.
Night of the bell. The timber warehouse, far end, from the loft. Nine treated in the shop: hands, a forearm, eyes, an ankle, two palms, a sleeve's burn, a knee, a cough. Two sent to the hill: Genji the watchman — face, chest, hands; voice torn; cooled, covered, litter at the second watch. Tai of the sheds — fell the loft's height; belly hard; pulse fast; kept still and warm on his plank; nothing by mouth; the doctor carried him at dawn.
Cost of the night: both salve pots, emptied. Powder, three sachets; the shelf stands at four. Lamp oil, a full can. Cloth, the winter bolt opened. Coins taken: none. The night was the street's, not the counter's.
On the fever shelf, the one pot stood where it had stood all night, untouched. The bell's work had not asked for it. Outside, the street was doing its morning in a smell of wet ash, and somewhere up the hill two pages of his writing were doing work he would never see.
He left the book open on the counter to dry, and went to put the kettle on.