The autumn cutting began in clear cold, with the mist lying in the yard's low corner and the feverleaf beds standing at their year's last growth.
Ren cut the way Hisa's rule had taught him: the outer leaves, the crown spared, nothing taken that the plant would miss before the frost. The beds had paid for their year already — in the spring's frost, which had taken the stone bed's rows down to a remnant, and in the summer's handfuls, which had gone to the making basket by basket. The autumn cutting was what was left of them to give, and it came up the yard counted as it came: two baskets off the strong beds, full and level, and a half basket off the stone bed — a small half, gathered out of rows that had never thickened after the frost.
He counted the standing rows before the cutting and after it, the way the beds had been counted all year: fourteen rows of the eighteen the spring had planted, and of the stone bed's six, the wall-side row still the strongest of them, the way it had stood since the frost's morning. The salve bed beside them had done its quieter year — forty-eight plants, all leafed, cut from at the counter's ordinary pace — and its cutting went to the salve shelf and not to the sealing table, and the book kept the two beds' kinds apart the way it kept the two sources apart.
He wrote the cutting in the book the way the year had taught him to write the beds: in counts first, and in leaf after.
The beds' autumn cutting: two baskets, and a half of the stone bed. The rows stand thinner than the spring promised and thicker than the frost allowed. What the beds give this year, they have now given. The winter will ask nothing more of them.
The making ran across three days of the counter's gaps. The leaf dried on the racks the short way, in the dry autumn air, turned morning and evening, and came off light. The jars were scalded and dried and filled at the long table in the evenings, and every jar labelled before it was set down, the year's way since the summer's first sealing.
On the third evening, eighteen jars stood in a row on the counter, and Ren counted them up onto the high shelf by tens and units, aloud, the way the shop counted anything that other hands would count after his.
That night the book took the shelf's new count.
Sealed and standing: one hundred and two cures. Of the beds' leaf, fifty-three; of the bought leaf, forty-nine — the year's two sources, under their labels and their months. The list stands at five. Their courses come off the autumn makings, in their order, as the autumn gives them.
Two days later the office sent a note down, folded once, on a runner with other errands in his sash.
It asked for the keeper of the herb shop in the morning, and for the shop's day book with him. No paper was named in it, and no reading promised. A summons with a book in it was a new shape of errand from the hill, and Ren read the note twice before he folded it into the day book it had named, and kept the counter till the shutter with its words sitting under his hands' work like a stone in a stream.
The door was barred in the morning, and he went up the hill with the book under his arm, against the day's first traffic, unhurried as a man whose errand is the carrying.
The clerk took him at the long table by the window. On the table lay a folder Ren had not seen before — new boards, a clean spine, nothing written on it yet. Beside it, in a stack kept square by the clerk's resting hand, lay the year's papers: the trial's three pages, copied fair; the standing order, with its month-line beneath it. And the question sheet of the derived preparation, folded the way it had been folded in the summer, when the clerk had said it belonged to the year and not to the order.
"Open it," the clerk said.
Ren opened the folder. Inside, one page lay alone, ruled and empty, with a heading at its head in the office's clean hand: the shop's name, spelled the way the hill spelled it, and under the name a space left for a number.
"The office is gathering its outside suppliers into files," the clerk said. "A file is a number, and a page with a name on it, and the year's papers under the page. What the office has read of a shop goes into the one folder, where the next reader finds it in the file's order, and not in the order of the months."
He took up his pen and lettered the spine while Ren watched: the shop's name in his square clerk's capitals, and beneath it a number, fresh in wet ink, and he blew on the ink once, the way a man dries a thing he has just made true.
"The number is the office's," he said. "Every file the office opens takes the next."
He laid the year's papers into the folder in their kinds: the trial first, the standing order over it, the months under the order, the question sheet at the back, the way a question waits.
"There is a page the office wants that no delivery has ever carried up this hill," the clerk said. "For its own benches the office holds what they make and what they spoil. For an outside shop it holds the lots, and the labels, and the months. It will hold one thing more, which stands in pieces in your own book — the refusals. They go into the file, in their order, with their sums. Read me the page of them, Aoyama, and I will write it here."
Ren set the day book on the long table and opened it at the winter pages of the year before, and read the year aloud the way it had been written: not the sales, but the closed doors.
He read the storm summer first. The road out under the rain, the prices tripled on the far side of it — and the eleven names refused at his counter and written in the book, each with what he had not got, and nothing substituted for what he had not got.
He read the sedative. A strong lot, unlabelled, its buyer unnamed, offered against twelve thousand of the debt. Refused on the day it was offered, and written in the hour's ink, and never thought of since without the writing.
He read the broker's winter visit. The whole reserve, every jar standing on the shelf, offered at twice the board's price — sixty-three thousand, six hundred ryō of counted money, against forty-two thousand of debt. Refused, and written, with the street's names standing unserved on the other side of the page.
And he read this year's quieter lines. The fallow flats written as nothing in the count of his sources, and nothing advanced on them, though the advancing had been his to offer. The leaf bought at the posted price only, tranche by tranche, at the gate where every buyer read the same board. No note asked, and no note offered, all the year.
The clerk wrote as Ren read, in his clean hand, on the file's fresh page — the sums set down plain, the refusals in their order, the page ruled off at its foot when the reading ended. He sanded the page, and laid it into the folder behind the months, where a reader coming to the file whole would meet it last.
"You keep a page for what a shop would not do," Ren said.
"The office keeps pages for what a shop does," the clerk said. "This is the page of what it did not do. Both pages are the shop, Aoyama. The office reads them together, or it reads nothing true."
Ren went down the hill in the afternoon with his day book under his arm and nothing else changed in his hands. The file stayed on the hill, in its number, with the year's papers in it and the year's closed doors written at its back. It was not a standing, and it was not a promise, and the book at the shop would have said so if the book had been asked. It was a count of the shop that other men now kept — and the keeping of it, like the keeping of the months, was work that would go on up there whether the shop watched it or not.
That evening the counter ran its ordinary course: the salt measured out, a salve pot for a shoulder, the salt drink by the cup for a carter with the day's cold in his face now instead of its heat. The salt drink's season was ending with the heat's — soon the street would want it hot or not at all, and the board would keep its price either way, and the book would write the change when the street made it, and not before. And the high shelf stood at its hundred and two in the lamplight, under their labels — the year's answer so far, counted, and waiting on the autumn's harder questions.