Chapter_74_The_Muster

The day after the notice went up, Xiaosui recited the shelves to Wen Heng.

Third shelf, the styptics. Second, the suturing. Hot to the left, cold to the right. Wicks in the bottom drawer, trimming scissors never leaving the lamp. She got through it in one breath and stood waiting to be corrected.

Wen Heng didn't correct. She asked one thing: "Why does hot go left?"

"The side you reach first. For emergencies."

"Mm." Wen Heng said. "The shelves are learned."

Xiaosui went to fill the water. She was half in charge of the med station now: stove, accounts, and whatever Wen Heng needed before it was asked for. The one lying down taught a line; the one standing wrote it down. In two days, every shelf had its order.

The running ledger changed shape too. Before: who came, what wound. Now a column at the end — when the dressing was due, whether done. Wen Heng read it through and put a dot at the foot of the page. Xiaosui asked what the dot meant. "Pages with a dot," Wen Heng said, "I check again the next day."

The next day she really checked. She found one dressing done and not recorded; Xiaosui wrote it in fast. "Remember that feeling," Wen Heng said. "An account isn't afraid of mistakes. It's afraid of mistakes nobody knows about." Xiaosui wrote that down too.

At night she went home, and Chen Jin asked about the station. She told him the shelves were learned, not one wrong. He said "Mm," and left her half a steamed bun.

The reporting slips came into the wards over those same two days. One slip per household: how many mouths, who could do what, who could walk — written plain, thumbprint below. The med station got its slip too — two people, one lying down, one writing. Xiaosui reported Wen Heng's name for her, then pressed the receipt flat under her small book.

At noon on the third day, the council sat in the account house.

Three ledgers came to the table: grain, work, med, each in its own cloth wrap, unwrapped and stacked. The ward-officers sat in a ring. At the far end, one more seat — empty until its owner came. Bi Chengzhang arrived neither early nor late: whatever hour the notice named, that was the hour he stepped through the door. The same wool coat. The cleanest cuffs in the port, still.

The grain officer read first: "Grain holds to spring. On short rations, it's enough." A pause. "Thick porridge every meal, no. Thin, yes."

Someone asked: "Short by how much?"

"In past years the granary held grain back. Not this year. What comes in, goes out. What we save is spoilage, not food."

Da Liu read the work roll: "The works has eighty-one names. Two shifts, the forge never cold. The reloading line adds a shift — hands picked from the collapse-district helpers. The steady ones. The roll is here."

Song Laixi followed with the labor camp's book: "Eleven hundred names. Three thousand work-tickets; the ones due are paid, the rest are here." He set a bundle of stubs on the table. "Nobody works for nothing."

Zhou Zhengting glanced at it: "Wartime tickets get paid in full. The labor camp folds into the work roll."

Then the med roll, read standing by the young dispenser. Thirty-seven wounded, nineteen who could walk, eighteen who couldn't; the medicine stocks, item by item, in three divisions — the first held for the wall, Wen Heng's old rule. At the bandage line he read as written: "Bandages, forty rolls, made up today." And he added: "This roll was dictated by Officer Wen, lying down. Not one entry missing."

The room was quiet a breath. Wen Heng hadn't come. Her roll had come — and it had come as a neat account.

The reporting rolls came up last. Pages from every ward and post — uneven in thickness, uneven in hand, every page carrying its thumbprints. Zhou Zhengting went through them one by one, red brush checking line by line. When he finished he set the brush down.

"Able-bodied for the wall —" he said. "Nineteen hundred and odd."

Nobody spoke. The standing posts, every ward and section, were already on the rolls; these nineteen hundred were on top of that. Collapse-district helpers, boatmen idled ashore, shop hands, street porters. They had the strength and the will, and no name to file under, no standing, nowhere to be put.

Someone asked, low: "All of them to the wall?"

"To the wall what the wall needs. To the works what the works needs." Zhou Zhengting said. "The wall isn't short of hands. It's short of trained ones."

That was when Bi Chengzhang spoke. He gave the port's account: berths standing empty, boats on the register, when the fishing season opened — line by line, level, like a fair copy read aloud. He closed the book he'd brought, fingers on the cover.

"And boats?" he said. "The notice doesn't mention boats."

Zhou Zhengting looked at him.

"The muster reaches into every household." Bi Chengzhang said. "Boats are a gate of this city too. Berths empty, a boat register on file — if the notice has no boats in it, the roll is missing a page."

"The boats' notice," Zhou Zhengting said, "comes separately."

Bi Chengzhang nodded, sat back, and didn't speak again that session.

Chen Jin stood at the end. He was always brief.

"The tide went out," he said. "Out isn't gone."

This text was taken from NovelPhoenix. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"The jars have been quiet thirteen days. Last time they were quiet this long, the swarm was moving house." He looked around. "The tremor ledger in the works has a line in it — the longer the quiet, the heavier the sound that follows."

"Next time, they won't give us this many days."

The room stayed still. Someone set a teacup down halfway and changed to laying it down soft. The grain officer closed his ledger. Zhou Zhengting drew the notice paper to him: "Then this notice gets settled today."

He drafted it on the spot. The first pass filled half a page; he read it out, shook his own head, and tore it up — a notice isn't an essay; if three sittings won't hold it in the ear, it's no notice. The room watched him tear it, nobody rushing him. The second pass he wrote slowly, line by line, and it came out as four clauses:

Every name on the roll takes its post.

Grain to the granary. Work to the works. Medicine to the med station.

Those who cannot walk — the roll holds a post for them.

And at the bottom, four large words: EVERY ONE IN PLACE.

He passed it along. It went around the ring once; nobody added a word, nobody picked at a phrase. Chen Jin looked last, then pointed under the first clause: "Add a line. If a name is missing on the roll, they come and claim it within three days." — people came and went in this city; a roll was bound to miss some. The missed ones wouldn't come on their own. They needed a date.

Zhou Zhengting took up the brush and added a small line beneath: Noted — names missing from the roll, claim them within three days.

By dusk the notice was on the wall.

The paste was fresh-mixed, the paper as wide as a door plank. Those who could read stood in front and read it out; those who couldn't stood behind and listened. The reader was a clerk from the account house, one line at a time. At the third clause someone called: "Those who can't walk — do they count?"

The clerk read it again as written: "Those who cannot walk — the roll holds a post for them."

"What post?"

"Officer Wen of the med station," the clerk said. "Lying flat, and the roll still opens a book under her name."

The crowd went quiet a moment. Someone else asked: "And the children?"

"The school keeps its own roll, under the old teacher. The third clause misses no one."

Somebody in the back said: "A muster's a good thing. From now on, whose work is whose — the account has a number for it."

The crowd broke up with steadier steps than it came. The old man with the carrying pole didn't leave. He stood under the notice and heard it through again. The reader asked: "No need for three readings this time?"

"No need," the old man said. "My second boy's name is on it."

At dusk Xiaosui traced the notice under the med station's lamp. The charcoal stub was worn to a thumb's length; she traced slowly, and when one character went wrong she cut the whole line and started over — along the fold, one clean stroke. At the third clause she stopped. She thought of Wen Heng's small book, the line nobody got to see. That clause she traced slowest. Finished, she held the page at arm's length: four straight lines, the last four characters largest of all.

"Too neat," she said.

Wen Heng, lying flat, finished it for her: "Like something official."

"Not frowning this time." Xiaosui smoothed the page. "Medicine accounts should be neat. A muster roll should be too."

Wen Heng looked at her a while and said nothing. Xiaosui laid out tomorrow's lesson — children reading in turn, stepping forward at their own family's name, stepping forward into their post. "The old way was: know yourself first, then the notice," Xiaosui said. "This time it runs the other way — know the notice, then the post."

When she finished, Wen Heng reached for the small book and added a line. Then she closed it, and showed no one.

At night the lamp in the account house still burned.

Bi Chengzhang had left when the session broke. The ward-officers had gone too. On the table three stacks: grain, work, med, squared and neat — and a fourth, the reporting rolls, higher than the three together, squared book by book under Zhou Zhengting's hands. Chen Jin hadn't left.

"Those seventeen boats out at sea," he said. "Eleven days now."

Zhou Zhengting's hands stopped on the stack.

"I read the sailing roll," he said. "Seventeen boats. Forty-one souls."

"The day the boats went out," Chen Jin said, "a day for coming back should have gone out with them."

He regretted it as it left his mouth. The night that notice was drafted, the whole city's mind was on the wall; the sea had no place in the first day's orders — those seventeen boats had run the reef line under bare sails, the southern shallows, all of it. But accounts don't care. An account only records whether it was written.

"A notice calling boats back is easy." Zhou Zhengting said. "If people come back, it's a notice. If they don't—"

He didn't finish. He pushed the reporting rolls across, down at Chen Jin's hand.

"Nineteen hundred and odd," he said. "The Ember Guard's roll starts over from the first page."

Chen Jin looked at the blank cover. One breath. He opened it. The first page was empty.

"Start over how big?"

"Two thousand."

Chen Jin took the roll.