The Baker Who Sorted the Starfruit

Every autumn, starfruit fell on the village of Little Ember. They came down soft as snow all through the last week of October, and they were of three kinds, and the difference mattered enormously.

Goldstars made bread that made you brave. Palestars made bread that made you sleepy, which was excellent at bedtime and a disaster before market day. And Ashstars made bread that made you hiccup for a fortnight.

Baba Rilla had sorted starfruit for sixty-one years, and she had never once got it wrong. That autumn she took an apprentice, a long-legged boy called Pim, because her hands had begun to shake.

Four things to look at

Pim expected to be told which was which. He held up a fruit and waited. Baba Rilla did not tell him. She folded her arms and said, “How many points?”

“Five.”

“Weigh it in your palm. Heavy or light for its size?”

“Heavy.”

“Smell the stem end. Tap it with your thumbnail. Now — what have you got?”

Five points and heavy, sweet and ringing: Goldstar.Six points and light, and dull to the nail: Palestar.Seven points, and a smell like a wet coin: Ashstar.Learn the looking, and the naming comes free.

By the end of the first week Pim could sort a basket without slowing down. By the end of the second he could do it in the dark, because points and weight and smell and sound do not need daylight.

The trouble with a lucky rule

Now, Pim had noticed something Baba Rilla had never mentioned. All that autumn, the Goldstars simply looked gold. He could tell them across the room. He stopped counting points. He stopped tapping. Why bother, when the colour did it for you?

It worked beautifully for nineteen days. On the twentieth the weather turned, and the sky went the colour of old pewter, and the light in the sorting shed turned everything a flat and identical grey.

Pim stood over the baskets with his hands hovering and his stomach cold, because he had stopped learning the looking and started trusting a trick.

Baba Rilla did not scold him. She put a fruit in his hand, closed his fingers round it, and said: “Good. Now count.”