"I said pick it up!"
"Your pardon, sir!" Hiro set the tray of sake cups on the counter and bent to collect the fallen bowl.
"All of it!" The soldier barked the words at him, like a sergeant on the parade round.
Customers moved past Hiro as he scrambled after individual noodles, picking them from the gaps between the floorboards, rescuing them from beneath wooden soles. He knelt at the table, scooping the noodles into the bowl.
"Faster!" A hand gripped his shoulder. The soldier squeezed, and Hiro yelped in pain.
Hiro gathered all he could see, even the mashed ones.
I'd like to make you eat it now, you pig. He said nothing though and kept his eyes lowered.
"I should make you eat this," the soldier said, as if reading Hiro's thoughts. The other soldiers at the table laughed. The man set his foot to Hiro's hip and pushed him away. "Get me another bowl, and be quick about it. I shan't expect to pay."
Hiro hurried into the kitchen. He slipped through the crowd of table-boys waiting for orders, and snatched up a bowl from the wash pile. He peered into the black lacquered dish, shiny enough to show his own distorted reflection. His face looked thin, even stretched like this, as though by a trick mirror.
"Hiro, wire-shrimp for table seven." Olmato waved an order slip at him from across the room.
He remembered how Olmato had arrived as a snot-nosed apprentice. And now he gave him orders.
"In a moment." Hiro shook his head. How did Olmato come to give him orders? Might as well ask how the Owner came to own the restaurant, how the emperor took the throne against so many odds, swords, and hatreds.
For a moment he considered spitting into the bowl before ladling noodles from the pot. His mouth went dry at the thought the soldier might know or guess. He heaped the noodles in and left the kitchen's heat for the crush of the main room.
"Your food, Honored Sir."
The solider took the bowl without looking at him and continued the story he was telling.
"And I told him if any Watto clan dogs came to the gate again I would not be so lenient!" The soldiers laughed and banged the table with their fists.
Hiro walked away. I wish I had spat in it.
"Hiro!" Mamoso from the drinks bar.
Hiro pretended not to hear. Mamoso always had an errand for him.
"Hiro!"
Oh what is it, you great mound of whale blubber? Hiro just wanted to slip into the stock room and collapse onto the flour sacks. To lie there and think of Kenmia and her dark hair.
