The hill's cart came down the street in the morning, and the street made way for it the way it made way for a litter.
It was not a street cart. It was the hospital's own: clean boards, a canvas cover tied down against the snow, and a clerk walking at the horse's head with a sealed paper in his sash. Carts went up that street every day of the year. This one was coming down it, to a herb shop, and the street stood at its shutters to watch it come.
The clerk stopped the horse at the shop's step and gave Ren the paper with both hands.
"From the hill's office," he said. "The seal is the office's. I am to wait for your count."
Ren broke the seal at the counter, with the street looking in at the door, and read the paper twice. It was written in a clerk's fair hand, and it said what it said without dressing.
The hill's own fever preparation was spent. The wards were full, and the bench still stood without its preparer, and the doctors were at the beds. The office therefore requisitioned — the word stood plain in the paper — sixty fever cures of this shop: dried, sealed, and labelled, of the shop's standard, at the shop's posted price of three hundred ryō the cure. Eighteen thousand ryō in all. Inspection on delivery, at the hill's storehouse, before payment. The paper carried the office's seal, and the date, and nothing else: no plea, and no promise beyond the price.
"Sixty," Ren said.
"Sixty," the clerk said. "If the shop has them to give."
Ren looked at the shelves. Seventy-one jars stood under their seals, row on row. Below the counter, weighted with its stone, lay the list: twenty-three names still waiting — and at its head the shed man's girl's name, struck through with one clean line and still readable under it, served in her order.
He did the count the way the shop did counts: aloud, and in the open.
"Sixty go to the hill," he said. "Eleven stand. The eleven are the list's — the first eleven names, in their order. The rest of the list waits on the wave, the way it has waited. The hill's wards hold this street's worst cases in beds tonight. A jar at a bed is a jar where the fever is thickest. That is the count, and I will write it in the book beside the paper."
"The office will take your count," the clerk said. "The jars are yours until they are accepted. You will come up with the cart."
"I will come up with the cart," Ren said.
First, Ren set the eleven apart on the high shelf, in one short row of their own, where his hand would not touch them by mistake. Then they loaded the sixty in their straw, in rows, under the canvas. Toma counted them onto the cart by tens, aloud, jar by jar, and the clerk counted behind him, and the two counts agreed at sixty, the way counts should.
"Toma," Ren said. "The door stays half-shuttered till I am down again. No seals break while I am gone. If the list's people come, they read their names where they stand, and they wait for me."
"The stall will watch the door too," the boy said. "She said so."
"Then the door is watched," Ren said. "Twice."
The cart went up the hill street slow, through the snow, and Ren walked at its side with the day book under his arm. The jars were his until the hill accepted them, and a man walks with his goods while they are his.
At the hill's door the porter knew him, and jerked his chin at the cart, and waved it through to the yard without a word. The jars were carried in and set in their rows on the storehouse tables, under a clerk's lamp, and the canvas came off, and the straw.
The man who came in then was not a clerk.
He was tall and lean, with his dark hair tied back and a face that kept its thoughts the way a shut book keeps its pages. The clerk at the door named him as he entered, in the flat tone used for facts: Nara Shikaku, head of the Nara clan — the clan that kept the village's medicine book, the book no outside hand opened. On preparations, the hill's office took its outside word from him. He had come to give it.
He did not greet Ren. He walked the rows once, slowly, and stopped where he chose, and no one told him where to stop.
"Six jars," he said to the clerk. "By lot. Not the first six your hand finds."
The clerk drew the jars by lot, from the rows' heads and middles and ends, and set them in a line on the clean board. Shikaku took up the first. He turned the jar once in his hands. He read the label — the name, the drying week, the mark — in a voice with nothing in it but the words. His thumb went over the wax seal, slow, the way a man tests a knot. He set the jar down and took up the second.
"Source of the leaf," he said. It was not a question with any warmth in it. It was an item on a list.
"It stands on the label," Ren said. "River leaf, from the flats below the bank. Bought standing, cut by my own hands, dried in the week the label names. The day book has the buying of it, against the seals."
"The course of the cure?" Shikaku said.
"Three days," Ren said. "One measure at morning, one at night. It is written on every jar."
He worked down the line of six, jar by jar, with thumb and eye and the label's words said flat. The sixth he held a moment longer, against the lamp, looking through the glass at the leaf's colour. Then he set it in its place in the line, exact.
"The seals are true," he said. "The labels agree with the jars. The count agrees with the paper." He looked at Ren then, once, directly. "The price on the paper is your board's price."
"It is the only price there is," Ren said.
Shikaku took the requisition copy from the clerk and signed it with a short stroke, and gave it back.
"Accepted," he said. And he went out, without another word to anyone, the way he had come in. No book had been opened. No favour had been asked, and none had been given. The standard was the standard, and the jars had met it, and that was the whole of his errand at the hill that day.
At the office, the clerk counted the hill's money onto the wood in hundreds: eighteen thousand, counted. Ren counted it off the wood into the hill's own bag, stack by stack, and the clerk tied the bag's mouth and sealed the knot with the office's seal, so the money would arrive as the hill had counted it.
In the corridor, Andō passed with his bag in his hand and the tiredness standing in his face like weather. He stopped at the sight of the sealed bag.
"The wards took our own stock in the second week," he said. "Your jars will be at beds by nightfall. That is not a compliment, Aoyama. It is a count."
"Then count them well," Ren said. "Eleven stand on my shelf for the list. When the hill's fever breaks, send word down. The street keeps its own count of the same wave."
"It will be the same word for both of us," Andō said, and went on up the corridor toward the lit doors.
Ren walked down the hill in the afternoon with the sealed bag in his sash and the signed paper folded in the day book, and kept the counter till the lamp was lit. The agent came at evening, on his winter round. The strongbox knocked once against the door frame as he brought it in. He set it down by the counter and beat the snow off his shoulders with the flat of his hand, and stopped at the sight of the shelves.
"The hill's cart," he said. "The street is talking of nothing else."
"The street talks," Ren said. "The book counts. Sit, and count with me."
Ren cut the bag's cord himself, at the counter, in the lamplight — a seal was opened in the open, in front of the man it was opened for, or it was not opened at all.
"Eighteen thousand, as the hill counted it," Ren said. "Count it again."
They counted it together, a hundred at a time, the two voices trading the hundreds the way men trade the ends of a rope. Then the fever money: Ren brought the strongbox up from under the counter and counted two thousand of it onto the wood, and after it the carrying, in its small stacks.
"Twenty thousand for the page," the agent said. "And the carrying beside it."
The agent's book came up onto the counter. Under the ten thousand's line, the square hand wrote its new words.
Paid at the fever's height: twenty thousand. Balance: twenty-two thousand.
He set his seal to the line. Ren wrote the words into the day book in his own hand, and signed beneath them.
Before the lamp was out, he wrote the winter page in full, and folded the requisition paper into the book at the page, where its seal could be seen.
The hill's requisition: sixty cures, at the board's price, inspected at the hill and accepted. Eighteen thousand for the sixty, and the whole of it went to the number, with two thousand of the fever money: twenty thousand paid. Balance: twenty-two thousand. Standing on the high shelf: eleven cures, for the list's first names. The middle shelf stands bare. The low shelf stands bare, by the rule. The list holds twenty-three names, and the solstice stands at the week's end.
He stood a while and looked at the short row of jars on the high shelf, eleven seals in the lamplight.
The shelf was short. The winter was not.