Chapter Seven

After their third meal—turnips and chicken broth—P’eng found herself wandering the path that led to the slough. She stepped onto the wooden dock that ran out over the reeds, and paced slowly to the end. Out beyond the end of the dock, a couple of posts stood. They supported a system of ropes and wooden buckets. P’eng pulled at the rope so that one of the buckets dipped into the clearer water further out in the slough.

Then she reeled the pail back towards her and unhooked it. But instead of carrying the water back to the li as she had vaguely meant to do, she sighed, put the bucket down and looked around. Off to her left, the millet fields sloped lightly up from the slough. She turned to stare back towards the Lady’s Garden. From this distance, its walls stood like a small square against the pearly sky.

P’eng turned to face the opposite direction again. On either side of the dock, the stems and sharp pointed leaves of rushes stood up out of the water. They were tawny and dry—dull gold against the dull silver of water and sky. It would be a little while before the new green shoots pricked the top of the water. How many times had she seen the new rushes emerge?

She sat down on the gray wood of the dock. From a little pouch hanging at her waist, she pulled a pebble-sized piece of pottery and rubbed it absently while she counted.

Three times, she thought. It had been three times that the light node had shuttled its long way back and forth across the sky since she and Chuan had come to live here. Three of the Short Winters, when the light node was in the north and the rushes turned light brown and swelled their stiff heads with seed. And three of the Long Winters, when the light node was too far in the south for anything to grow; when the reeds turned black and the long stems sank into the water, to wait for the light to return and the cycle to begin again. And in between, six summers, when they planted the millet and harvested it; when they planted turnips to harvest throughout the winter.

P’eng rubbed the pebble in her hand and bent her head to examine. The clay had been shaped like a tiny peach, and was covered in a dark brownish-black glaze that gleamed almost like metal. Her father had made it for her. Of all the potters in the capital, he was the best. He could tease the clay into the finest, thinnest pots and bowls. It was a long time since she had seen him—so long that P’eng realized suddenly that she couldn’t quite picture his face.

She and Chuan, children of an artisan, should not have been sent here as daughters of the garden. That role should have been filled by twins from a noble family, who would come when they were old enough to have seen five passes of Yao-chi’s shuttle. They would stay until they saw the end of their tenth shuttle, then return home to have their hair fastened up with a jade hairpin and be married to some young man from another noble clan.

But twins were rare. Last time, there had only been one set of girl twins of the right age among all the noble families of the capital. And tending the lady’s garden had become a distant duty, no longer a position of great honour. The Lady Wei had screamed and wept and refused to let her daughters go. So the Count of Religious Affairs had come to their father and ordered that his motherless twin girls should come and take on the task of tending the garden. The count had given their father a new potter’s wheel and a parcel of land in exchange.

When they arrived, there had been a number of families living in the huts, although there were much fewer than in the old days when several hundred people had lived here. It was clear, with the arrival of two peasant girls, that the garden was no longer an important matter to the Count of Religious Affairs. The other families drifted back to the capital. They were not punished for leaving; nor were they replaced.

Chuan had been eager to come at first, eager to leave the capital’s walls and set out across the wide plain. She had been quick in picking up the ritual, in learning from the guardian. For a little while, anyway. But then she had grown tired of it, and realized with horror that she would spend five long passes of the shuttle here. She was desperate to get back.

“What will become of us when we go back?” she would ask. “I’ll be almost too old to marry. Who will there be to marry anyway? The people of our class will be all paired off.”

But P’eng was not anxious to go back. She did not know what would become of them either, and felt a little afraid at the thought. It had been so long now . . . She found herself shrinking from the thought of the bustling market place and the faces of strangers. She had not wanted to come here in the first place, but now she knew it and her duties, and felt comfortable.

She was still sitting on the dock, staring, when she heard Chuan’s footsteps on the wooden planks beside her.

“Old Tsai hasn’t eaten anything,” she said. “His bowl was still full when I got it from his hut.”

P’eng looked at her in concern but didn’t say anything.

“The Lady’s still gone, too. Her bowl is still full again this morning.”

“Do you think something’s wrong?”

Chuan shrugged. “Who knows? She’s gone off before for a while and come back.”

“But the sky . . .”

“It probably means nothing. Something happened and now it’s over. Everything is back to normal.” She spoke drearily. “If only something would happen.”