The fourth month's sachets were ground and folded in the day's gaps, when the mortar's turn came, the hours bending around a standard that did not bend.
What had changed was not the making. What had changed was the paper it was made under — a standing order now, with the shop's conditions standing in the office's own hand — and the mortar seemed to know it no more than the pestle did. Twelve sachets. What the sieve refused went back under the stone; the sieve's refusals were never argued with. Every sachet carried its label — name, week, mark — and the box was laid in two rows of six, the labels turned up.
The grinding went begging for hours that month, because the counter took the day first: the noon cups of salt drink, carters squinting in the glare, a boy sent down twice in one hour by two different yards for the one errand and served twice without a word about it. The mortar took what hours were left to it: a gap before the shutter, a quiet after noon, once a lamplight hour with the street empty. The standard asked its fineness in August as in March, and would not be argued with; that was why it could be trusted, and why it cost what it cost.
In the morning Ren took the box up the hill through the gate's traffic, and the clerk was at the long table by the window, the standing folder open at the order's page, and took the box there — the paper Ren had signed, with the year's room standing empty under it.
The clerk went through every label on the row, the whole twelve of them, the way labels had been read all year.
Then he did the standing paper's measure. The paper's own words named it, and the clerk followed the paper the way clerks follow papers: half of every lot, weighed at the office scales, of the clerk's own choosing. He chose from both rows, without pattern and without haste — six sachets, lifted out by his hand, and weighed against the office's weights one by one.
The weights agreed, six of six.
Under the order's words, on the same page, the month's line went down in the office's clean hand — the first line the standing paper had ever carried, and the fourth the year had counted.
Standing order, first month under the paper — the year's fourth. Twelve sachets of wound powder, of the shop's standard. Labels read in full. Six weighed at the office scales, of the clerk's choosing. Accepted: twelve of twelve.
He laid the month's money out on the table in hundreds: one thousand, four hundred and forty, twelve times the sachet's price. Ren returned it to the box by his count, and his count and the clerk's were one count. The receipt went into the lid folded, with the trial's three.
Coming down through the gate at the noon hour, Ren passed the road yard's gate as the carts were going out to their dinners, and Daichi came out of the yard among his fellows with his dinner cloth in his hand and the cane's tap keeping its own small time against the stones.
He stopped at the shop on his way, the way a man stops at a counter that is on his road, and set a small cloth of coin on the wood.
"A pot of the salve," he said. "The leg tells the weather a day early now, and it is stiff with the telling by evening. The yard laughs at it. It holds my weight on the slope all the same, and a prophet that works is worth its feed."
"The yard has a weather-man of its own, I have heard," Ren said. "An old one, with a knee."
"It has. He charges nothing and is wrong by turns. Mine charges me a stiff evening and has the day right oftener than he does. The yard is coming round to asking the leg first, which the leg finds above its station and does not answer." He grinned the grin of a man whose misfortune has been promoted. "It is still a leg first, herb-man. It does its carrying before its prophesying, and I keep it to that order."
"It is for the stiffness," Ren said, "rubbed in at the day's end, worked round the joint. The weather it tells you is your own keeping, Daichi. I do not sell the forecast, and I do not sell against it."
"For the stiffness, then. The forecast is mine already, and it has never once been wrong."
He paid the board's price off the cloth — eighty, in counted coin — and watched the pot wrapped, and took it under his arm with his dinner cloth, and went on down the street at a working pace among the carters going to their dinners. He was one figure among the noon's figures, and the counter's day took him the way it took the salt buyers and the salt-drink boys: in his turn, at his price, with his errand answered in the words it was asked in. The book would hold him in no special line. That was the whole of his standing in the shop, and it had been earned the hard way, on a litter, in the autumn — and neither of them spent a word of it.
At the day's turning, the leaf cart came down the street and stopped at the shop's door.
It was the season's second cutting off the road villages — a bigger cutting than the first, the summer's full growth on the stalk, sold green-weight for the drying to be the buyer's, the way the first had been sold. The seller this time was a woman of the road villages with her brother's cart and her own scale in its box, and her price was said aloud at the door before a basket was lifted: the season's fair price — the board's kind of price, not the storm price of the bad year, and no buyer's favour in it.
The leaf was weighed at the door on the shop's own scale, in the doorway's light, twice — once as it came off the cart in its baskets, and once basket by basket as it went through to the yard. The baskets were counted as they passed: nineteen, and the nineteenth the fullest, the way the last of a cutting always is. She watched both weighings with her arms folded, the way sellers watch weighings, and the two counts came out near enough to be one count spoken twice.
"The first cutting was the spring's growth making its offer," she said, while the baskets went through. "This is the year full-grown, and it dries heavier for it. My brother says a buyer who dries his own is a buyer who comes back, and the road would rather sell to the coming back than to the once."
"You can tell your brother the road's leaf is weighed twice at this door," Ren said, "and counted as carefully coming in as it will be counted going out in jars."
"That," she said, "is what the road says of this door already."
The price was counted out in hundreds on the counter, indoors, by lamplight's beginning: two thousand, six hundred, counted by Ren across the wood, and counted back by the seller into her sash — and no note asked, and none offered, and the money was done when the counting was done, that day.
Behind the shop the yard took its third shape-change of the year.
That morning Ren had cut the beds again — the second cutting, at the season's turn. He had cut the strong beds the way the rule travelled: outer leaves only, the crown spared, nothing stripped bare. The basket had come up heavier than the first cutting's, and it had been counted the same way, in handfuls at the rows — for a yield counted kindly was a yield lied about, and the beds' second truth was bigger than their first and plainer for being counted no softer. The stone bed's two rows gave their handfuls thin and honest, the wall-side row fuller than its brother, as the frost's count had said it would run all year.
Now the bought leaf and the beds' leaf went onto the racks together and apart: the wall of frames from the summer's building, loaded end to end for the first time. Frame after frame of green weight, the bought leaf on its cords, the beds' leaf on its own, two stocks and no mixing, the cords full the way a page is full when the writing reaches its edge. The mass drying of the year's reserve had begun, and it filled the yard's whole wall, and the turning of it, morning and evening, would be the counter's second work until the leaf came off dry.
That night the day book took the month's counts, in the same hand as the year's, and favoured neither count.
Standing order, first month under the paper — the year's fourth. Twelve sachets, labels read in full, six weighed by the office's choosing — all true. The hill paid at the board's price: one thousand, four hundred and forty. The box stood at five thousand, two hundred and seventy.
Bought at the door, the season's second cutting off the road villages, at the season's fair price: leaf for the reserve's making, two thousand, six hundred — weighed twice at the door, counted twice, no note. The box stands at two thousand, six hundred and seventy.
The racks stand full, wall to wall: the bought leaf and the beds' second cutting, each on its own cords. The drying will take its week, and the week will be turned by hand.
Outside, the yard's wall of cords held its green weight in the dark, row under row, and the shop's shutter was down on a street gone quiet. The year's count of sealed jars had not moved yet by a single pot, for all the leaf on the cords, because leaf on a cord is a promise a shop makes to itself, and this shop counted only what was sealed.