Chapter 7: The Line on the Post

"You read my mother," said Mei.

It was the morning of the twenty-first, a gray, soft, windless morning with mist lying on the lake like steam on a bowl of rice, and she had waited until she'd made the tea. She had made it the way she made it when it was going to be a bad day, strong enough to stand a chopstick in. She held his cup out to him across the stove and didn't let go of it when he took it.

The prince looked at her over the two hands on one cup.

"You were awake," he said.

"I'm a ferrywoman. I sleep with one ear in the water." She let go of the cup. "Keeper Tan. Nine hundred and twelve, likes kelp, keeps track of the cook. You pulled a scale off your arm to wake him up so you could read about my mother."

He took his time. He turned the cup round in his long fingers, and there was a new raw patch at his wrist beside the old one, pink and shiny.

"I read a line in the Register," he said.

"Hers."

He studied the tea.

"It's mine," said Mei. "Her line. It's not a story for a dragon who got bored in the night."

He opened his mouth.

"You want to know something about me, you ask me," said Mei. "And I'll tell you or I won't, and either way you'll pay for it. You don't go and get it out of a turtle."

"Yes," said the prince.

She had been ready for him to argue. She'd had the whole thing ready, the turtle and the scale and who do you think you are, and she stood there with her mouth half open and nothing to put in it.

"Yes?"

"You're right," he said. "I shouldn't have read it without you." He drank the tea. It was bitter enough to strip tar. He didn't make a face. "I won't do it again."

Mei closed her mouth.

She took her own cup and went and sat in the stern with her back to him, and drank her tea, and stared at the mist. After a while she said, without turning round, "I have to paint the post today."

The county paid her three coppers a line to keep the flood marks fresh.

That was the arrangement, and had been since her grandfather's time. Her father had married into the ferry, which is how a ferry gets handed down in a family without sons, and he had died of a fever the winter she was six. Every spring, when the water started coming up, the ferrywoman at Willow Crossing waded out and painted the white lines on the old post again, so the boatmen coming down from the hills could see how high the water was and decide whether to risk the narrows. Eight lines, a hand apart. Twenty-four coppers. She had never yet got the county to pay on time, and she had never yet let them forget it.

She poled the ferry out to the post with the paint pot wedged between her feet. The prince stood in the bow and held them steady against the post with the boathook, which he could do; it didn't need any skill, only a long arm and a willingness to be told he was doing it wrong. She painted.

The water was a finger and a half over the third line. The paint went on thick and white over the old marks, and the mist curled round the post, and she worked her way up the lines one by one.

Above the eighth line, a hand and a half higher, was the red one.

It had flaked. It was always flaking. The red paint she'd bought fourteen years ago from a peddler had been cheap, the only kind she could pay for out of the coppers in a ten-year-old's sleeve, and it had never stuck properly to the tar. The line was patchy now, more black than red, a broken stripe across the post at the height of a tall man's head.

Mei looked at it.

She never looked at it. She had told herself for fourteen years that it was a flood mark like the others, and she painted the others, and she let that one be.

"What is it," said the prince.

She heard herself answer before she'd decided to. "The water. The year she drowned. That's how high it came."

"That's higher than all the others."

"It was the worst flood in sixty years. Everybody says so." She dipped the brush in the white, by habit, and wiped it on the edge of the pot. "There's red in the cabin. Under the stove."

He didn't ask. He let go of the post and went and got it. The ferry drifted a little, and she put her hand flat on the tarred wood to hold them, and felt the post cold and wet and solid under her palm, as it had been that day.

He came back with the pot. She took it, and opened it, and stood up on the bench, and began to paint.

"It was the Dragon Boat Festival," she said.

She said it to the post. It was easier to say it to the post.

"The water was higher than this. It came up over the steps and into the tea shed. Auntie Tang had her kettle up on a stool."

The brush went along the wood. "Everybody said they ought to call off the race. Nobody wanted to. The Lis from the south bank had a new boat and a new drum, and they'd been boasting since New Year."

She moved along the post. "So they raced. In that." She dipped the brush. "Six boats. Both banks on the landing to watch, and on the roofs, and in the willows."

The prince was holding the boathook against the post. She could see his hand at the edge of her eye, white on the wood.

"The Lis' boat went over at the narrows. Right there." She pointed with the brush, out past the post, at the gray water where the lake pinched in between the hills. "The current took it sideways and it rolled. Twenty rowers in the water. And my mother was the only boat that wasn't racing, so she went out."

"Alone."

"She was the ferry. That's what the ferry's for." The brush stopped. "She got eleven of them into the boat. I counted. I was on the steps with Auntie Tang, counting out loud, and the woman next to me told me to shut up."

The red went on, a hand's width at a time.

"The others got to the bank, or got pulled out with ropes. And she poled back with eleven men in the boat."

"Eleven," said the prince.

"So low the water was coming over the sides. And when she was nearly in, about here, by the post..."

Mei painted. She made the red line very straight.

"Something took her," she said. "She was standing in the stern with the pole, and then she went over the side. As if a hand had come up and pulled her ankle. Everybody saw it."

The boathook creaked in the prince's hand.

"She came up once and got hold of the post with both arms. The water was going past her so fast it made a wave on the upstream side, like a rock in a river."

Mei touched the wet tar, once, at the height of her own chest.

"And she held on to the post and looked at the landing."

She had finished the line. She went on painting it anyway, going back over it, over and over, the same stripe.

"Ten paces," she said. "From the steps. The whole of Willow Crossing was standing on them. Two hundred people. Strong men who'd been rowing all morning."

She put the brush down.

"She held on to the post and looked at them," said Mei, "and nobody went in." She laid the brush across the pot. "Then she let go. Or something pulled. That was all."

The prince didn't speak.

"They say you don't pull a drowning one out," said Mei. "The water wants its turn, and if you take it off him, it takes yours. My mother never held with that." She picked up the brush again. "Eleven of them were alive to say so."

The mist was lifting. She could see the far bank now, the willows of the south shore coming out of the white one at a time, and the landing behind them, and Auntie Tang coming down the steps with a tray. Auntie Tang never came down the steps with a tray. She came down slowly, holding the tray with both hands, and stopped at the bottom, at the edge of the water, and stood there in her red apron looking at the post.

Mei put the lid on the red pot.

"What's she doing," said the prince, low.

"She's seen what I'm painting." Mei got down off the bench. "She doesn't like it. Pole us in."

He poled them in. He did it well, for once, a straight line from the post to the steps without a single circle, and Mei thought he was probably trying hard, and wished he wouldn't. The ferry bumped against the bottom step. Auntie Tang held out the tray. There were two cups on it, and two sesame cakes, and the cakes, Mei saw, had been cut into the shape of flowers, which Auntie Tang only did on the first day of the year and at funerals.

"On the house," said Auntie Tang. "Both of them."

"Both?"

"Both. Don't argue with me, I'll change my mind." She studied the prince. She'd been watching him for six days from the tea shed, when she thought he wasn't looking, and Mei knew perfectly well what she'd been working out on the abacus. She wasn't working it out now; she was trying to see through him to the bottom.

"She's told you," Auntie Tang said.

The prince inclined his head.

"Did she tell you I held her?"

Mei turned the brush over in her fingers.

"She was ten," said Auntie Tang to the prince. Her voice was perfectly steady and her chin was going. "Ten years old, and that big. She was halfway down the steps. She'd have gone in."

"I got her round the middle and I held on," said Auntie Tang, "and she screamed and kicked and bit me, here." She held up her left hand. There was a little white crescent of a scar in the fat at the base of the thumb. Mei had seen that scar every day for fourteen years, handing over coppers, and never asked what it was. "I held her until it was over, and I'd do it again. I've never been able to look at that post since."

"Auntie," said Mei.

"Eat your cake," said Auntie Tang. She put the tray down on the step, and turned round, and went back up to the tea shed, quickly, without looking back, and they heard the kettle lid rattle as she banged it down.

Mei sat on the step with the tray beside her and didn't eat the cake.

She didn't know what to do with her hands, and she had the brush still, the red one, and she held it, and turned it, and the paint was drying on the bristles and she'd have to throw it away, two coppers, and she didn't care. The prince sat on the edge of the ferry below her, with his long legs folded up and his too-short sleeves, and kept his eyes on his knees. Out at the post the new red line was bright in the clearing light, the brightest thing on the lake.

"I bit her," said Mei. "I didn't know that. I didn't remember."

"I always thought she just stood there. Like the rest." She put the brush down on the tray. "Fourteen years I've been saving that up. I had a whole thing I was going to say to her one day. Every one of them, I had a thing." She laughed, and it came out wrong. "Twenty-four coppers I'll get for the white lines. If the county pays. Nobody pays for the red one."

The prince was watching the post. Scales had come up along his throat, all the way to the jaw, white as salt, and he didn't seem to know it. His eyes went from the bright new line to the water a finger and a half over the third mark and the five white lines between them, and his face was shut.

"Two hundred people," he said. "Strong men. Ten paces." He turned his head and looked up at her on the step. "Why did nobody go in?"

Mei picked up one of Auntie Tang's flower-shaped cakes, and turned it over, and put it down again.

"Nobody ever does," she said.