The Boy With the Yoke, Back on His Two Streets

Dust is on the Archive Steps again. That is how you know Dryheat has really returned, not just visited for an afternoon. The gutters along Ulev Street are dry enough that a cart passed through one this morning without the wheel dropping into standing water, the first time since before the river came up.

The water-boy is back on his full round. For two weeks he only did half of it — the low end of Mulov, where the flood had left enough standing water that half his usual houses didn’t need him. Now every garden wants him again.

He carries two buckets slung from a wooden yoke worn smooth on the shoulder side, and he walks Ulev Street first, Mulov second, because Ulev’s well is closer to the Bazaar end and he fills there before the queue forms. He does not fill both buckets full at the first house. He empties a third of each into whichever garden looks driest from the gate, then tops up at the next well along, so the weight never sits wrong on one shoulder for more than a hundred paces.

The order of houses is not the order anyone asked for. It is the order the ground asked for. Marfa’s cabbages get water before the widow’s roses, because cabbages wilt by noon and roses only sulk.

He is at it before the sixth bell, same as the notice says. Nobody pays him by the bell. They pay him by the week, and trust the bell to hold on its own.