The racks went up by midsummer, the way the plan had written them on the solstice page: the racks up by midsummer — a line of last winter's ink, paid this summer in posts and cord.
Ren finished the wall of them in the week's long evenings. Frame after frame along the side that held the sun: posts sunk and wedged, cross-pieces lashed, cords strung level and pulled true, each frame checked against the yard's light before the next was set. A rack in the wrong place would have stolen the beds' sun to dry the beds' own leaf, and the yard was too small for that kind of foolishness. The last frame stood where the shed's shadow never reached before the day's end. When the cords were all strung, the yard had a second wall, made of air and lines, and the summer's work had somewhere to happen.
He checked the light by his grandmother's rule for a field: with a stick and a day's patience. At the second hour he set the stick where the last frame stood and marked the shadow's edge in the soil; at the third hour he marked it again, and at the sixth. The beds kept their sun whole, all four of them, from the second hour to the day's decline — the measure of his spring pacing, kept now by a wall of cords as it had been kept by an empty yard. A measure kept twice, by two different yards, was the only kind the shop had ever trusted.
The first picking came at the week's turning.
He cut the strong beds the way he had been taught on another hillside, in another year: the outer leaves, the crown spared, nothing stripped. The rule had travelled from his grandmother's teaching to Sana's flats the autumn before; this summer it came home to his own ground, and his own beds paid it the way all ground pays it — in a smaller basket than a greedy hand would have filled.
He counted the picking in handfuls at the rows, the way a first yield is counted before it is anything else: handful by handful, row by row, into the baskets. The two strong beds gave three baskets of green leaf between them, and the stone bed's two rows gave a half basket more, gathered slow over the thin lines — the row along the wall fuller than its brother, the way the frost's count had said it would be. A handful taken for pride would have been a row missing in the autumn, he had written in the spring. Three and a half baskets was what the truth of the rows came to, and the book would hold the handfuls' count when the leaf had become something countable in the shop's own language.
The picked leaf went onto the new racks beside the bought leaf of the gate, which had a week's start on it and was already turning from green weight toward dryness. The beds' leaf spread on its own frames, the bought leaf on its own — two stocks, two sets of cords, no mixing: what a jar would one day say about its making began here, on the cords, in the keeping-apart.
The drying week ran at the summer's pace. The leaf was turned by hand, morning and evening, the way leaf is turned when the weather is the maker's to read: a still day wanted the cords full, a wind off the river wanted the edges weighted, and the sun did the summer's work at its own price — which was a week, neither hurried nor forgiven.
On the week's fourth night the weather presented its own bill. Ren woke to the air gone thick and the frogs loud off the river, and read the sky by its smell the way the street read it: rain before the dawn, and the cords full of half-dry leaf. He worked in the dark with the lamp hooded — the bought leaf off its frames first, being further from dry, then the beds' leaf — and carried it all under the shed's roof in armloads, spread on the mats in the dry dark, and sat with it till the rain came at the hour the air had promised. It rained an hour, hard, the summer's way.
In the morning the leaf went back onto the cords, none of it wetted, none of it lost — and the week the drying had been owed became a week and a day, and the day was written nowhere but in the maker's arms. That was the difference between leaf dried at a stall by other men's weather and leaf dried at home: at home, the weather sent its bills to him.
In that week the list took the making again: three names, in their order, each in its turn.
The seventh name was Hatsu of the dyers' corner, whose cough had come in the last weeks of the wave and settled there, and stayed, fed by the vat air of her yard. She came at noon herself, with her hands dyed to the wrist in the summer's indigo, and paid the board's price onto the counter in counted coin.
"The course is for the cough the fever left," Ren said, wrapping the cure. "The vat air is your yard's, Hatsu. I cannot sell you out of breathing it. What the course does, it does against the cough. The rest is the dyers' weather, and it is not on my shelf."
"I breathe it or I do not eat," Hatsu said. "Give me the cough's answer, then, herb-man. The rest is my weather, as you say."
She repeated the taking back — the whole course, three days, morning and evening, the cup hot — and took the cure down the street under her arm, into the smell of her own yard. The seventh name came off the list.
The eighth name was old Mori, the basket-mender, whose fever had left him late, his chest rattling like a loose weave. Mori did not come. His grandson came at the hour the mending yards shut, a boy of twelve with the price knotted in a cloth and his grandfather's words carried in his head like water in a cupped hand.
He said the words too fast and got the taking wrong at the first saying — morning and evening swapped for evening and morning, which was no swap at all, and then the cup cold, which was wrong. Ren set the boy's hands flat on the counter and had him say it again, slow, the way the shop set anything that had to travel without its maker.
"Three days. Morning and evening. The cup hot. If the rattle deepens, he comes to me or the word comes to me — not a fourth day of waiting."
The boy said it true the second time, and took the wrapped cure in both hands, and went down the street at the pace of a boy carrying instructions. The eighth name came off the list.
The ninth name was Kame, the gate watchman's wife, who came at dusk when the watch had changed and her man's long night was beginning without her. Her cough woke her in the night's middle watches, she said, and she slept in pieces the way the watch slept, and hated it for them both.
"Will the course give me the whole night?" she said.
"It is for the cough," Ren said. "A night is a long order, Kame — longer than any course of mine runs. If the cough eases, the night will take what the easing gives it. That is the whole of what I can write on it."
She paid from the watch's wage cloth, counted steady, and repeated the taking back once, clean, like a woman used to watch-orders. The ninth name came off the list. The list stood at five.
At the drying week's end, the leaf came off the cords.
It came off dry and light and smelling the way the standard said feverleaf should smell before it was anything else — the beds' leaf and the bought leaf weighed apart, batch from batch, the way they had dried apart. Then the making, at the long table, in the day's last long light: the courses measured, the jars scalded and dried, filled dry and full, the wax poured and worked round with the hot knife. Each label written before its jar was set down: the name, the drying week — the summer month — and his mark; and the book took the sources against the seals, the way sources were written in that book, so the shelf would never have to remember what the page could hold.
That night the high shelf held the year's first standing count.
Sealed and standing: thirty-six cures. Of the beds' picking, thirteen; of the bought leaf, twenty-three — under their labels and their month, on the high shelf. The middle shelf keeps the shop's ordinary stock; the low shelf stands bare, by the rule. The list stands at five.
Thirty-six was not two hundred. It was not a fifth of the way to the plan's number with the summer half spent, and the book wrote no apology under it and no promise over it. It was the first count the year had answered in sealed jars — small, and sourced, and true — and the racks stood empty along the wall in the dark, waiting for the next cutting the way a page waits for its next line.