The Rooster Who Would Be Immortal — Chapter 11: The Curse That Washed Off

The Deacon of Duties gave Elder Mo ten days to end the kitchen curse, or leave the mountain. Brass, who had shown this sect how to lift a beam, hang a bell and give lightning a road to the ground, had never even heard of the kitchen curse until that morning.

"The Hall started calling it that this week," said Ling Yue, very quietly, in the kitchen doorway. "Since the storm, the dining hall has had the gripes."

Eleven disciples lay in the healer's hall, holding their bellies.

"The water is boiled," said the healer. "I checked. The rice is cooked. And still it starts here."

"Ten days," said the Deacon. "If the sickness is still coming out of this kitchen on the tenth morning, the Hall will close it and find a new cook."

Mo said nothing. He went back to his stove and stirred a pot that did not need stirring.

Two days earlier, in the Scripture Pavilion, Keeper Wen had asked where Brass got her brush. Brass had stood there with his one ugly word. Then the Deacon's runner had burst in with the news of the sick, and everyone had run. Nobody had answered the keeper.

Brass had Dawn Crow and Iron Spur. You cannot crow at a bellyache, and you cannot kick one.

So he watched.

Mo's water was boiled. Mo's rice was cooked. But after every meal, two hundred bowls came back slick with pork fat, and Ling washed them in a tub of cold water from the barrel, wiped each one with the same rag, and stacked them. There was never firewood enough to heat washing water. When Brass looked closely, the clean bowls shone. Water ran off them in beads, the way rain runs off a duck.

He pecked the tub. He pecked the woodpile. He pecked the big pot.

"Hot water?" said Ling. "For the bowls?"

Mo looked at the woodpile, which was the kitchen's firewood for the next two months. Then he looked at the rooster. Then he lit the fire.

For two days every bowl went into water hot enough to sting. The woodpile shrank under Brass's feet. And on the third morning, three more disciples went to the healer.

The hot water had melted the fat off the bowls, all right. Then the fat had floated on top in a greasy skin, and every bowl that went in after came out wearing it.

Water and grease do not mix. Heat them, scrub them, and in a shared tub the grease only moves somewhere else. Whatever was riding in the grease moved with it.

He needed something that could hold on to grease and water at the same time.

The answer came from the hens, who had once helped him lift a beam.

Behind the kitchen was the heap where Mo threw the cold ashes from the stove, and for twenty years he had scraped the burnt pork fat from the bottom of his pans onto the same heap. It had rained in the night. Down at the bottom, where years of fat lay soaking in wet ash, one of the hens kicked through a grey puddle, and the puddle foamed.

Brass stepped into it. It bit. He jumped out with his foot red and stinging, and limped for the rest of the day.

And there it was: a board, chalk, a jar of fat and a jar of ash-water on a teacher's desk.

There is lye in wood ash, and lye burns. Boil lye with fat, and the two become something new: soap. Soap is like a tiny thread with two ends. One end grabs grease. The other end holds on to water. Scrub, and the grease ends grab the fat and the dirt and the germs riding in it, and then the water ends let the rinse carry all of it away. Soap does not make germs vanish. It lifts them off, so the water can take them.

But it only works with scrubbing and rinsing, every time. It cannot cure anyone already sick. And lye burns skin and blinds eyes, and soap made badly still has lye in it.

[SYSTEM] Brass learned: fat plus lye makes soap, which lifts grease and germs so water can carry them away · cost: the lye burns until it has all become soap

He limped to the kitchen, stood in front of Mo and crowed.

"No," said Mo.

So Brass showed them: the ash bucket, the crock of pork fat, his own red foot, and then the heap, dragging Mo there by the sleeve.

"A medicine," said Ling slowly. "Ash and fat, boiled. We give it to the sick..."

"Nobody drinks anything from my kitchen that I do not understand," said Mo. He pulled on his thick leather gloves, picked up a greasy bowl with the tongs, ladled a little of the grey puddle over it, and rinsed it under the pump. The water did not bead. It ran off in one clean sheet.

"Not for eating," he said. "For washing." He looked at the rooster's foot. "And not for feet."

Soap-making was an old craft. Mo had watched his master do it, in gloves, with his eyes covered, and he did it the same way: out in the yard, far from the kitchen, with Ling sent well back and not allowed to touch any of it. "It ate the skin off my old master's thumb," he said. "It can have your eyes."

Brass split kindling for the fire with his spurs.

[SYSTEM] Iron Spur — kindling for the soap fire · cost: another armful of the shrinking woodpile

Mo tied his master's horn eye-shield, with its two thin slits, over his face and stirred the big pot from a long pole's length away. The pot spat. All evening, slowly, the fat and the lye stopped being two things and turned thick and brown, like a jelly.

Then Mo bent to lift the last of the lye.

His back went. Brass heard it go, like a dry stick snapping. Mo jerked upright, and the eye-shield, tied loosely the old way, slid up onto his forehead. Real eye cover fits close and cannot slide. The crock tipped in his gloved hands, struck the rim of the hot pot, and the lye jumped straight up at the old man's bare eyes.

Brass was already in the air.

He did not think. He never did; that had always been his flaw. He spread both wings in front of Mo's face, and the lye hit him instead.

It burned like a fire that would not go out.

"Healer," Mo said to Ling. "Run." She ran.

Mo grabbed the rooster in both hands, bad back and all, and got him under the pump. He held him in the cool running water with one hand and worked the handle with the other, on and on, for as long as it takes to cook a pot of rice, and then longer. His arm shook. He kept pumping. When the healer came, the healer took the handle, and Mo held his own face and hands under the water too.

That is what a lye burn needs, at once: someone sent running for help, and cool running water, a great deal of it, for a long time, longer still for eyes. Lye is no trick for a kitchen. It burns skin and it can blind. Real soap-makers are trained, and wear gloves and eye cover; it is not work for children. Buy your soap.

When at last Mo let Brass go, there were feathers left in the mud. A patch of the rooster's breast was bare and pink, and his right wing hung, raw along its edge.

"A month," said Mo, "before you open that wing. Try to climb a cliff with it and it will tear."

A month without the cliff, the Founder's Seat, or Grandmother Pine.

Mo sat down in the mud, which was very bad for his back.

"I know what you are," he said. "I have known since the morning after the fever. I stood in that doorway and watched a kitchen rooster break through to Qi Gathering on my woodpile. It took me eleven years." He breathed out. "I gave you rules. I gave you a page. I never once said it in plain words, and I never said it to the Hall at all. Because the Hall would not call you a curse this time. They would call you a question. And they would want to take the question apart to see how it works."

"The founder of this sect kept her secret for three hundred years. I can keep yours." Then, gruffly: "Next time, let me go blind, fool bird. I can cook blind. You cannot climb with one wing."

Brass leaned against his arm. Mo let him.

The soap was a soft brown jelly that smelled of smoke and pork. It sat in its pot for three days, the old way, before Mo let it near anyone's hands. While it sat, more disciples went to the healer, and Brass watched the door.

On the seventh morning, Mo, bent like a hook, set a bucket of it at the kitchen pump, on the way to the dining hall, and nobody passed without scrubbing their hands and rinsing them under the running water. Every bowl was scrubbed with it and rinsed under the pump.

The inner disciples balked. "Pig fat," said one. "On my hands."

Senior Brother Hua was in that line. Broker Shen's runner had gone back down the mountain with nothing, the morning after the storm. Hua still owed Shen, and he had looked tired ever since. He looked at the bucket. He looked at the rooster on the woodpile, bald patch and all.

Then he pushed up his sleeves, scrubbed his hands, rinsed them under the pump, and walked on. After that, nobody balked.

That first soap morning, two more disciples went to the healer, and Brass felt his heart drop into his feet.

"Caught before your soap," said the healer. "It takes a day or two to show."

After that, nobody.

On the tenth morning the Deacon came with her ledger. She looked at the bucket by the pump. Then she held out her hands, and scrubbed, and rinsed.

"No new sickness for three days," said the healer.

The Deacon wrote. "Kitchen remains. Cook remains." She looked up. "Elder Mo. Whose idea was the soap?"

"The rooster's," said Mo.

The Deacon looked at the bare breast and the folded wing. "And the wing?"

"Also the rooster's," said Mo, and went back to his stove.

[SYSTEM] Kitchen trial passed: no new sickness for three days · cost: a burned wing that must stay shut for a month

On his way out, Hua stopped by the woodpile.

"I have not forgotten the beam, bird," he said. "Or the bell. Or the ring." He looked at the bald patch. "I have decided to stop counting."

At sunset he came back down, slowly, with Keeper Wen on his arm.

The old man stopped at the kitchen gate and looked at Brass with one eye.

"Where did you get her brush?"

This time Ling answered. "Under his coop, Keeper. In a jar. Her verse led us there. Both pages."

Keeper Wen nodded, as if that was exactly what he had been waiting to hear. Then he said nothing at all, because nobody had asked him anything.

Brass stared at him, very hard, the way he stared at the sun.

Ling looked down at the rooster. Then back at the keeper.

"Keeper," she said. "Is there a page three?"

Keeper Wen opened his other eye.

"Nobody ever asks that," he said, and took a scroll out of his sleeve. He had brought it with him.

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