The Second Table

The second table appeared at lower quay before Marta had fully decided whether the first one had been wisdom.

Lin brought the news at first bell, wet to the shin from tide mud.

"Widow Han has dragged a plank under the second-landing awning. She says if bodies are going to arrive with witness slips, she is done pretending hunger can restart the whole question every time."

By noon Marta had crossed to the quay with Lin and Bao.

Widow Han's table was rougher than Gao's, narrower, crooked at one leg, set beneath patched matting that smelled of tide rot and lamp oil. Nothing about it was ceremonial. That made it real.

Two carriers stood before it with a widow and a boy between them. Han looked up once at Marta, did not rise, and asked the widow, "Whose hand?"

The woman answered with the correct names.

Han asked, "What morning?" then, "Present where?"

Not body. Present where.

The quay had already changed the question to fit water.

When the widow answered well, Han let the boy onto the mat without waiting for any blessing from South Gate.

Only after the bodies had moved did she turn to Marta.

"You can be offended later. The tide will not."

Marta looked at the plank. At the half-used witness slip. At the bowls set close by where hungry people could wait and answer without losing sight of the landing line.

"Why here?"

"Because your lane is uphill. Because a body who has already been passed once should not have to perform its truth again in front of water."

She was right too quickly for comfort.

Bao drifted toward the plank edge.

"Do you ask all four?"

Han tapped the table with one nail.

"Here I ask what keeps people from being washed away by delay. Hand. Morning. Present where. If the line wants more, I ask more. If the body wants less, I ask less."

That afternoon South Gate felt decentered on Marta's skin.

The table at the lane had not become a model. It had become a species.

---

The price of open witness arrived as lost work.

A washerwoman from ash lane came at dawn with her sister's boy and a clean witness slip, then left before Gao could finish the second question because the dye vats had already started choosing backs for the day.

"I cannot stand here and lose the kettle line. If the boy's truth takes all morning, his truth can starve this evening."

She was not wrong. That was the trouble with public witness.

Gao swore at the city in categories.

"Only the rich get free time for virtue. Everyone else pays witness in bowls and daylight."

At lower quay Han had solved it before South Gate admitted there was something to solve.

She set a bowl beside the plank. If someone must stand through two bodies not their own, the next passed widow dropped millet or coin when she could. Not a fee. A standing bowl.

Gao hated the name at once.

"That is a fee with a sad face on it."

Marta hated the necessity more than the form.

Because once standing acquired a visible wage, the city's moral geometry sharpened in ways no board could hide.

Some bodies needed witness. Some people knew how to stand. Standing meant time. Time meant hire. Hire meant food.

The poor had built a public mouth, and now the mouth was demanding labor of the same bodies it meant to spare.

By afternoon the lane was muttering a new phrase:

Who stands.

Not whose hand. Not what morning. Who stands and at what cost.

Two women argued over whether a witness slip carried weight if the woman who sat the table had done so only because she had been fed for it.

"Fed witnesses still hear," one said.

"Fed witnesses hear what keeps them fed," the other answered.

Gao refused the bowl for one more day out of principle, then gave up when principle failed a coughing child whose mother could not stand through second bell without losing market hire.

She set a chipped tea bowl at one corner of the plank and told everyone within earshot that it disgusted her.

By dusk it held one onion heel, two millet scoops, and a half coin.

Bao stared into it as if it were a mirror more insulting than accurate.

"So witness has wages now."

Marta looked at the bowl, the plank, and the women still standing at it because someone had to.

"Witness always had wages," she said. "We only made them visible."