Chương 7: Chapter 6 — The Herb Garden

By the fifth day Ted had worked off one of his three demerits and earned a transfer off the wood detail, which was how the sect rewarded a body that did not complain: with a different way to use it. The herb garden was the new assignment, and it had a rhythm he was already learning. Mornings were weeding. Afternoons were watering.

Evenings were harvesting, and those shifts went to the disciples who had been here longest, because pulling a ripe spirit-herb without bruising the qi out of it took a steady hand and a sensitivity Ted did not have. He weeded and he watered and he kept his head down, and the garden, green and pungent and orderly in its fenced plot behind the storage row, was the least hostile place he had found in two worlds. It was also where the green-fingered woman worked. She was there every shift.

There when Ted arrived, still there when he left, moving down the rows at a pace that never changed and never tired. She was late twenties, he guessed, thin-faced, with her hair tied back in a plain knot with nothing in it. Her gray robe was the same as every outer disciple's, worn soft from washing, and the green stain on her fingers ran past the nails to the first knuckle, the mark of someone who put her hands in the soil all day and had stopped bothering to scrub it off. She did not talk to anyone.

She did not need to. She did the work of two people, and the supervisor left her alone the way you leave alone the one machine in the shop that never breaks. Early in his first afternoon Ted reached the end of a row and pulled a thin green shoot from the base of a plant, the way he had been pulling weeds all day. A hand closed over his wrist before the shoot left the soil. Not hard. Just there, green-stained fingers light on his arm, stopping the motion. The woman had crossed two rows without a sound.

She eased his hand back, freed the shoot, pressed the soil down around it with two fingers, and let him go.

"That one's not a weed," she said, low, to the plant and not to him.

"It comes up looking like one for the first season. You'd know that if you'd watered this row before." She went back to her own section without waiting for an answer. Ted knelt very still for a moment with his hands in his lap. He had watered this row before. Lin Shou had, anyway, for however many weeks, and Lin Shou would have known the shoot. The woman had just told him, plainly and without making anything of it, that she had noticed he did not move through the garden like the person who used to.

She had noticed, the way Chen had noticed, that he was wrong. And then she had fixed his mistake and gone back to weeding. Doctor Chen had felt the seam and reached for a brush. This woman had felt it and reached for the seedling. Ted filed the difference where he could find it, and went back to watering, more carefully now, watching which green things she left standing. * Later that afternoon, the garden went quiet. Two disciples by the rain barrel stopped talking. A third set her bucket down with too much care.

Ted's hand tightened on the watering can before he understood why, and then the understanding arrived the way the name at the stream had, surfacing out of the body with a flinch attached. Zhou Feng. He was broad, half a head taller than Ted, with a square face and a jaw that had been hit a few times and not minded. His robe was gray like every other outer disciple's, but it fit him better, cleaner, belted with a small metal clasp instead of the standard cloth tie. Two more disciples trailed a step behind him.

It was power and its audience, the same arrangement as the training yard, scaled down a rank. He came down the center path and stopped at Ted's row.

"Lin Shou." Ted set the can down and straightened slowly, keeping his head lower than Zhou Feng's, his eyes off the man's face.

"Senior Brother Zhou." The honorific came out smooth, pulled up from the body, and Zhou Feng's chin lifted a fraction at the sound of it. The greeting had landed where it was supposed to. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Heard you came back. Heard you got hurt on the road. Head injury." The words were easy, unhurried, pitched to carry to every worker in the garden without ever rising to a shout.

"Recovering?"

"This junior is recovering."

"Good. Recovering means working. Working means earning." Zhou Feng smiled, wide and practiced, all his teeth in it. It was the training-yard smile worn a size too big, an outer disciple's copy of an inner disciple's cruelty.

"You missed last week's contribution. And the week before, on the road. Two weeks. I'm reasonable. Half rate for the weeks you weren't here to enjoy. Three coppers." Contribution. Nobody at the duty hall had listed one. There was no contribution, only a man who collected the way a toll-keeper collects on a bridge he does not own, because no one had ever stopped him. The circled mark on the slip in Ted's pocket had a face now, and the face was smiling.

"This junior has no coin," Ted said, flat and factual, the duty-hall sentence, with no apology past the form.

"No coins. Head injury I heard. Memory problems." Zhou Feng counted them off on his fingers, and the two followers smiled on the beat.

"A lot of problems for one outer disciple. Good thing you've got friends who understand." He stepped closer. It was not a threat, just distance removed, close enough that Ted could smell soap on a robe that had no business being that clean. Behind him the two followers drifted sideways to stand across the path, casual, practiced.

"What about the herb packet Chen gave you?" Zhou Feng held out a hand.

"That covers it." Ted's fingers moved to the hidden pocket before he told them to. The packet was still there. He had been taking it in pinches with his evening rice, feeling the warmth crawl through the strained channels, the blockage in the lung meridian easing by degrees. It was working. Slowly, but working. Giving it up meant staying broken in a place where broken people carried wood until they stopped being able to. He took out the packet and held it out.

"Smart." Zhou Feng tucked it into his own robe and let the smile widen.

"That settles what you missed. The week coming is a new week, and the rate went up while you were gone. Two packets' worth, or whatever you've got that covers it. Miss a rest day and it doubles. Don't make me come find you." He turned and walked out, the two followers folding in behind. The disciple at the rain barrel waited until they were past the gate before she lifted her bucket again. Nobody looked at Ted. * Ted picked up the can and finished the row. His hands were steady, which surprised him.

Zhou Feng was simpler than the things that made them shake. He wanted a thing, he took it, he would be back on a schedule. No hidden score, no question with edges. Arithmetic. The debt would renew itself every rest day until Ted found a way to pay it or Zhou Feng found a softer target, and Zhou Feng did not look like a man who got bored of a working arrangement. A shakedown this open, this routine, this unbothered, meant one of three things: permission, indifference, or an administration too thin to notice.

Ted did not know which, and all three were bad. Ted had audited enough organizations to know the shape. The bully is never independent. The bully is a line item in someone else's budget, kept because he keeps the bottom quiet and passes a cut of the quiet upward. Somewhere above Zhou Feng was a person who found him useful, and that person, not Zhou Feng, was the actual problem. Ted did not have the name yet. He had the structure, and the structure was enough to be afraid of.

He refilled the can and started the next row, and somewhere in the carrying of water from barrel to soil the thing he had been avoiding said itself plainly. Survival by invisibility had a shelf life. He was beginning to see where it ended.

It ended on a bunk, hands flat, checking a boot for a scuff that was never there, every rest day, for as many years as the body lasted, paying contributions in herb packets or coins to someone who would always be stronger, because Ted had decided, on principle, never to become anything worth noticing. Invisible was not a destination. It was a way of standing very still while you lost. He did not have an answer yet. He had, for the first time since the convention, a clear view of the question.

The row done, he set the can by the barrel and started back toward the barracks. The green-fingered woman was still in her section, still bent over her weeds, still not looking at anyone. As he passed the end of her row, she spoke without raising her head.

"He comes every week," she said, quiet, aimed at the soil.

"Rest day. Before the morning meal." A pause, two weeds.

"Don't have nothing. Have something small ready or stay out of the garden till noon. He won't chase. Chasing's beneath him." Ted did not stop or turn his head. But he slowed half a step, which was as close to thanks as the rules allowed. It was the first thing anyone in this world had said to him that was not an order, a test, or a threat.

It had cost her nothing she could be made to account for, and it had bought her nothing in return, and she had said it anyway, to a face she had every reason to treat as already lost. It was advice given freely, with no transaction attached, offered to someone she was not willing to help and not quite willing to watch get caught empty-handed. He did not know her name. He knew that the list of people in this world who mattered, which had been empty since the convention, had just taken its first voluntary entry.