The first month of the trial was made the way every month of it would have to be made: at the long table, in the morning, before the street was fully awake.
The powder came first, before any sachet was folded. Wound powder, of the shop's standard, was not a thing bought in bulk and portioned out. It was made: the dried root and the dried leaf, ground in the big mortar in turns, sieved through the fine cloth, ground again where the sieve refused it, until the whole lot ran like sand and smelled the way the standard said it should smell. Ren made a month's worth and a little over, because the standard allowed for the sieve's refusals and the shop did not count what the cloth had turned away. The work took the morning's first hour, and it was the kind of work the hill had no hands for that year.
Twelve sachets of wound powder, of the shop's standard. Ren weighed the powder out on the brass scale, sachet by sachet, and then he weighed the lot again, all twelve together, the way the shop weighed anything that went up the hill — once in pieces, once in whole, and the two weights had to agree. They agreed. He folded the sachets shut and sealed them. Then he wrote the labels, one to a sachet, in his square hand: the name of the preparation, the week of its drying, the shop's mark. Nothing went up the hill without its label. That condition had been written under the office's own words at midwinter, and it stood.
He set the twelve in their box in two rows of six, with the labels up, the way a thing is set when it expects to be read.
He carried the box up the hill himself. It was the first month, and a first month of a standing thing was not a runner's errand. The road up was drying at last. The carts had churned it, and the sun was taking the churn out of it an hour at a time.
He went up through the season's traffic: a down cart loaded with the street's spring work, its carter walking at the team's head; two porters with a beam between them; a woman driving three goats with a stick and a voice that did the work of both. The village was moving again, all of it at once, the way it moved every spring — loads going down, empties coming up, everyone on the road with a winter's worth of errands held in their arms. Ren climbed with the box against his hip, at the pace of a man carrying glass, though what he carried was paper and powder and twelve written labels.
At the hill's gate the watch waved him through on the box's look alone — hospital grey was not his colour, but a labelled box from the herb shop had become a known sight on that road over the year that had passed, and known sights pass gates. He noted it the way the shop noted everything of the kind: without triumph. A gate waved open is not a door granted. It is only a road getting used to a box.
The hospital yard was at its morning work. A stretcher went past him at the gate, carried at a walk that was almost a run, and no one in the yard looked up from their own errand for it. The doctors were at the beds — that was the clerk's line on the first order form, a year of work ago, and it was still the plain truth of the place. The yard was full of the sick and the hurt. It was empty of anyone whose work was a mortar.
The clerk received him at the office, at the long table by the window. The trial paper lay open at the month's page. The clerk set the box down and counted the sachets against the paper, aloud, the way offices count when both sides are listening: twelve. Then he read the labels, one by one, the whole twelve — the name, the drying week, the mark — and he weighed two of them against the office's own weights, at his choosing, not Ren's. The weights agreed.
He wrote the month's line on the trial paper, in the office's clean hand, and turned the paper so Ren could read it.
Trial, first month. Twelve sachets of wound powder, of the shop's standard. Labels read. Inspected at delivery. Accepted: twelve of twelve.
"Twelve of twelve," the clerk said. "The office will say the same at the third month, if the second month reads like the first."
On the office table he counted out the month's money in hundreds, the way coin is counted when a paper stands behind it: one thousand, four hundred and forty ryō, at the board's price, twelve times the price of one sachet, and no other number in the room. Ren counted it back into his box. The two counts agreed. The clerk folded the receipt into the box's lid, where the shop would find it when the box came home.
Ren went out by the preparation room, because that was the way the corridor ran. Its door stood open on the spring light. The long bench ran under the window, scrubbed and bare. The mortars stood on their shelf in a row, clean and dry, big to small. A stool stood turned up on the bench, the way a stool waits in a room nobody works in.
He looked at it a moment longer than the looking needed.
"The bench waits for a preparer of the corps," the clerk said, behind him, not unkindly. "It has waited since before my time at this desk. The doctors are at the beds, and the office does the weighing — this year, at a table, like clerks." He shrugged, the small shrug of a man reading out a roster. "When the corps names one, the room will open. Till then, the trial comes up the hill in boxes, and we read labels."
Ren said that the labels would keep coming up readable. He went down the hill with the empty box light under his arm, and the coin in it, and the receipt folded in the lid.
At the shop, he entered the month in the day book, under the seed paper's lines.
The hill's trial, first month. Twelve sachets, of the shop's standard, labels read at the hill. Accepted: twelve of twelve. Paid at the board's price: one thousand, four hundred and forty. The box stands at five thousand, seven hundred.
Then he went out the back, because the ground had given at last, and the second work of the spring was waiting with its four sticks standing.
He dug the beds himself. First the weeds came off, a winter's mat of them, and under the weeds the spade found a footing of the old wall that had fenced the yard in his grandmother's time — three stones too big to lever out alone, which he dug around and left, the way his grandmother had plainly left them. The bed took its shape around them. The yard's soil had been a herb garden's soil in her time, before the years of the debt had narrowed the shop to what could be bought and sold, and under the weeds it was dark and willing. He dug each bed twice over. He edged them with stone from the yard's own pile. He laid the measuring cord and set the rows with string and sticks, the way rows are set when they will be counted later.
Three beds he sowed with the feverleaf, bed by bed, the seed out of the house's parcels, six rows to a bed, the rows a hand's span apart. The fourth bed he gave to the salve herbs: the seed in its rows, and the rooted sets spaced down the middle of the bed by the length of his hand, forty-eight of them, each one pressed into the turned earth and firmed with his palm.
Then the water. The well stood at the yard's far end, and the beds drank two buckets to a bed before the soil darkened all the way through. He carried the buckets at the pace the work asked for: eight trips, unhurried, while the light went down the wall.
That night he wrote the beds' page in the day book, the way stock was written in that book: as a count, with a place and a day.
The beds behind the shop, dug and sown. Three of feverleaf: eighteen rows. One of the salve herbs: seed in rows, and forty-eight rooted sets. Water at dawn and at dusk until the rows show. The ground was the shop's. The seed was the house's, at the quoted prices. The work was the shop's own hands.
Two beginnings stood on that week's pages. The trial's first month, closed at twelve of twelve, with the coin counted and the receipt kept. And eighteen rows of feverleaf in dark earth behind the shop, that no one could read yet at all.
The box stood at five thousand, seven hundred. The beds stood at nothing showing. Both counts were entered, and both were true.