Chapter One
Grass, Cart, Road
Dongping, east of the Liao. Autumn, 929 (six months earlier)
The character for captive has a tiger on its head.
Ryeon had noticed it when she was eight, the winter they first set her to copying military registers, in which the word turned up some four hundred times. Once she had seen it she could not stop seeing it: the tiger crouched across the top of 虜, and pinned underneath it, small and square, the character for man. She had decided then that it was the most honest character in the language, and she had not changed her mind in two years.
She had only stopped writing it where anyone could see.
Nobody in the prince’s house used the word. They said the Balhae people, or the scribes, or, in her case, the little scribe.
The prince was a king now, strictly speaking. When the Khitan took Balhae they had renamed it Dongdan and set the old Khitan emperor’s eldest son over it, and in his letters he signed himself King of Dongdan. In his own house, though, everyone still called him the prince, as if the other title were a coat he had been lent and might have to give back.
The prince collected things. Books, mostly, and horses, and painters, and, people said in the kitchens, one Balhae girl who had been found in the ruins of Sanggyeong at seven years old writing the Thousand Character Classic from memory on the back of a looted ledger. Ryeon did not remember the ledger. She remembered the smoke, and her mother’s voice, and her baby brother’s fist knotted in her mother’s hair, and then a long time on a cart. But she had heard the story told so often, by people who never guessed she was listening, that she had begun to believe it a little.
She came to the library before light every morning, because the steward counted the lamp oil and because the hour before the household woke was the only one that belonged to her. The building had been a granary until the year before, when the prince’s household came south from Sanggyeong to Dongping, east of the Liao, bringing its horses and scribes and books, and a great many of Balhae’s people walking behind them for a month on the road. The prince had thrown out the rats, lined the walls with red pine and filled the shelves. On damp mornings the room still smelled faintly of millet. She liked that. It made the books seem like something that had been harvested.
There were eleven ways out of the library. She had counted them her first week in the building, as she counted the ways out of every room she had been kept in since Sanggyeong. There were three doors. There were six windows, if you were small and did not mind the drop into the horse yard, and she was small and minded it only a little. There was the smoke hole in the roof, left over from the granary’s drying fires, which she had studied for most of an afternoon before deciding it was for birds. And there was the eleventh, which had taken her longest to find: to be so useful that nobody ever thought to lock you in.
She had been using that one for three years, in one house or another. It worked well enough that some mornings she forgot it was a door at all.
There was a second rule that went with it, though she had never counted it as a door. Everything she wrote in this house, she wrote in the library hand: the plain, upright regular script the scribes were all trained to, so that a register copied by nine different people looked as if one person had copied it. It was a good hand for a captive. It belonged to nobody. Her own hand, the one her father had taught her, leaned forward a little at the tops of its long strokes, and she had left it in Sanggyeong with everything else.
This morning it was the Wen Xuan, the great southern anthology, in a copy so water-stained that half of it had to be guessed. She knelt on a cushion on top of a stool on top of the matting, which was the only way to reach the desk, and she was three poems into the laments, at a line she was fairly sure was about snow, though it might equally have been about a dead friend, when the fourth window opened behind her and a boy fell through it.
She finished the stroke before she looked round. A blot on the Wen Xuan would cost her a week of explanations.
“You’re supposed to use the door,” she said.
“The door has my tutor outside it.” The boy picked himself up off the floor and brushed straw from his coat. He was her age, or near it, Khitan, with his crown shaved and two long locks at the temples after the fashion of Khitan boys, a bow case on his back he was not supposed to carry indoors, and the expression of someone who had been made to sit still since dawn and had finally stopped. “Hide me.”
“There’s nowhere to hide. It’s a library.”
“You’re always hiding in here.”
“I’m working in here.”
He looked at the desk, at the anthology, at her brush. Then he took a folded sheet out of his coat and held it out to her with enormous dignity, as though he were presenting tribute.
It was a copying exercise. Ten lines of the Thousand Character Classic, the first ten, which every child in the empire learned before anything else, each line copied five times in a hand that started bravely and went downhill fast. By the third repetition, Heaven and earth, dark and yellow had become a sort of fence. By the fifth it had fallen over.
“Your horse has five legs,” said Ryeon, pointing.
“That’s yellow.”
“I know it’s yellow. It’s also a horse with five legs.” She turned the sheet over. “Who’s going to see this?”
“My father.” The boy said it lightly, which was how she knew it was not light. “He’s going to look at it tomorrow. He looks at all of them. He says a Khitan who can’t write Chinese will be cheated by every clerk in the South for the rest of his life.” He hesitated. “You could do it. Your hand looks like a grown-up’s. Everybody says so.”
“Then everybody would know it wasn’t you.”
“You could do it badly.”
That was, she had to admit, an interesting problem. She looked at his five lines, and at the place where his hand gave out, and saw exactly how she would have to do it: the strokes a little thick, the third line drifting uphill, the character for yellow with its middle squashed, but not so squashed it looked like a joke.
“What do I get?” she said.
The boy’s face cleared at once. “Honey cakes. From my mother’s table. Two.”
“Four.”
“Three, and I won’t tell the steward you’ve been burning two lamps.”
She had not known anyone knew about the second lamp. She looked at him with new respect.
“Three,” she agreed, and held out her hand for the sheet, and at that moment a voice outside the door called, in the patient Chinese of a tutor who had been looking for a long time, “Young lord?” The boy went back out of the fourth window the same way he had come in, bow case and all, and the window swung shut behind him.
His name was Ruan, or at least that was his Chinese name, the one his father had chosen for him and his tutors used. The household called him the young lord. In the women’s quarters they still called him Wuyu, his Khitan milk-name, which he hated, and which Ryeon was therefore careful never to use except when she needed to win an argument. He was the prince’s son. He was also afraid of the prince’s opinion of his handwriting, which, as far as Ryeon could tell, made two of them in the whole household.
She put his exercise under the Wen Xuan for later and went back to the laments.
The second interruption came at full light, and it knocked.
“I knocked,” said Hulan, coming in sideways with something wrapped in a fold of cloth. “You always say I don’t, so I did. With my hand this time.”
She was fifteen, round-faced and Khitan, in a felt-trimmed coat, and she was Lady Gao’s maid and the only person in the house besides the young lord who spoke to Ryeon as if she were simply someone who lived there. They spoke Khitan together, because Hulan had no other language. Ryeon had had three years to learn it, and most of what she knew she had learned from Hulan, which meant she could swear in Khitan rather better than a ten-year-old ought to.
“Dried apricots. From the kitchen. Don’t say I never bring you anything.”
“I never say that.”
“You think it. I took them off the bottom of the jar, because the cook only counts the ones on top.” Hulan put them down at the far end of the desk, well away from the page, which told Ryeon she had been listening the last time. Then she leaned over the anthology with the frank interest of someone who could not read a single character of it. “What’s that one?”
“A lament for a dead friend.”
“The whole sheet?”
“The whole sheet.”
“Southerners,” said Hulan, with deep pity. Then, as if it had only just occurred to her, though Ryeon suspected she had been saving it since the kitchen: “Write my name again. My brother says I made it up.”
Ryeon took a scrap from the waste basket and wrote it large, as the clerks had entered it in the household register: 忽蘭.
“This one means sudden,” she said, touching the first character. “All at once. See the little shape at the bottom? That’s a heart. So it’s something that happens to the heart all at once.” She moved her finger to the second. “And this is an orchid. It has grass on its head, because it’s a plant.”
Hulan studied the paper for a long, satisfied moment.
“I’m a sudden orchid,” she said.
“You are completely a sudden orchid.”
Hulan folded the scrap in four, pressing each fold flat with her thumbnail, and put it away inside her coat, and remembered why she had come. “Lady Gao wants you. She said when she has finished her line, which means now, because I know you, you’ll finish the line and then another line and then it’ll be noon, and she’ll ask me where you’ve got to.”
Lady Gao’s rooms were on the warm side of the inner court, where the prince had had the floors heated in the Balhae way, with flues running under the stone. In winter Ryeon invented reasons to carry things there, and stood on the stone while her toes came back to life.
Lady Gao was at her writing table. She was perhaps twenty-two, small and soft-spoken, with a stillness that made people forget she was in the room until she spoke, and then wonder how much she had heard. She was the prince’s favourite; everyone knew that. And it was Lady Gao who had found Ryeon on the cart three years ago and said, in a voice that did not sound like asking, This one is mine, and had kept saying it until it was true. Gao was a Balhae name, and an old one, the name of Goguryeo’s kings. Ryeon had never asked how a woman who bore it had come to be sleeping in the conqueror’s house. There were a great many questions in this city that were only safe if you never asked them, and Ryeon had made a list.
On the corner of the table, holding down a stack of letters, lay a broken piece of roof tile: the round end of an eave tile, grey and weathered, with a lotus in relief on its face, six petals around a ring of seeds. Ryeon had seen ten thousand of them. They had looked down at her from every roof in Sanggyeong. She had not seen one since the road south.
Lady Gao saw her looking and said nothing about it.
“Sit,” she said, in Balhae.
She used the language rarely, and only when they were alone: the speech of the capital, which the old families of Sanggyeong spoke at home and called Balhae as if there were no other kind. Every time Lady Gao used it, for no reason at all, Ryeon could smell her mother’s kitchen: carp from the northern lakes, steaming over black fermented beans.
She sat.
“The prince wants a poem,” Lady Gao said.
Ryeon waited. In this house the first sentence was seldom the request.
“There is to be an embassy to Japan. The first since…” Lady Gao let the sentence go, as everyone in Dongdan let that sentence go. “It leaves as soon as the poem is ready. They want to cross before the worst of the winter seas. The Japanese judge a kingdom by its verse, and Balhae’s envoys used to win every banquet at their court. The prince wants Dongdan’s poem to sound like Balhae’s.”
“Then he should ask a Balhae official. There are three in the secretariat who could write it in their sleep.”
“He asked all three.” Lady Gao turned a coal in the brazier with a pair of bronze tongs. “He says their poems read like men writing with a knife at their backs. He wants one with no knife in it at all.” She set the tongs down. “I told him I knew a hand that had never been near one.”
Ryeon stared at her.
“I’m ten.”
“Yes,” said Lady Gao. “That is why I suggested it. No one in the world will ever believe it was you.” She drew a folded sheet from under the lotus tile. “He will copy it out himself. He has a beautiful hand, and he likes the Japanese to see it, so your hand will not be on it anywhere. These are the names of the embassy. You’ll want them for the dedication. Lord Yuzhi will want the draft by tomorrow afternoon.”
That, Ryeon understood a moment later, with the paper already in her hands, was the request.
She read the titles first. It was a habit, like reading a room before the faces in it. Ambassador. Grand Master of Letters. Vice-envoy. Clerk of the embassy. Then the names, in order, without hurrying, because Lady Gao was watching and hurrying would have told her something.
The first name was 裴璆.
Bae Gu.
She had been told, the first winter, that the men of her house had died at the gate when the city fell: her father and her elder brother both. Someone had said it kindly, in a corridor, and she had nodded, because she was seven and it seemed to be expected, and then she had gone and counted the windows in the room they put her in. Nobody had ever told her otherwise. Looking at his name now, in a clean clerk’s hand, she understood that somebody in this house had decided not to. And that today, for some reason, somebody had decided to.
The last time she had heard that name spoken aloud, her mother had been shouting it across a courtyard in Sanggyeong, through smoke, in a voice Ryeon had never heard her use before or since.
She read the rest of the list and folded it along its crease. She did not let her hand shake, because her hand was what this house kept her for, and she had trained it accordingly.
“Do you know him?” Lady Gao asked, without looking up from the coals.
“Everyone in Balhae knew him.” Her voice came out level, and a little bored, and she was fiercely proud of it. “He went to Japan twice as ambassador. They say the court there let even the lesser nobles wear sable while he was in the capital, so that there would be enough furs in the room to receive him.”
“Yes,” said Lady Gao. “I heard that too.” She looked up then, and her face was perfectly calm. “Then you had better make it worthy of him.”
Ryeon did not cry until she was back in the library with the door shut. Then she cried for about as long as it takes to grind an ink stick, which was as long as she allowed herself, and then she ground an ink stick, because she had one night, one candle, and paper enough for six drafts, and none of those things would wait.
She began with the rules. Five characters to a line. Four lines. The tones had to fall in their proper pattern, level against oblique, and the second and fourth lines had to rhyme. The Japanese prized restraint, so the feeling had to sit under the words rather than in them, like a fish under ice. All of that she could do. She had been doing it since before she lost her front teeth.
The difficulty was the other reader.
Yelü Yuzhi was the prince’s chief minister, a lean, quiet man of the prince’s own Yelü clan, who wrote Chinese like a southern clerk and read everything that left Dongdan like a customs officer opening a crate: thoroughly, and expecting to find something. He had been reading her copying for two years. He knew her turns of phrase. And he would certainly do what every careful reader did with a poem from a Balhae hand, which was to run his eye along the first character of each line, in case someone had hidden a word there.
Everyone hid words there.
So she could not hide a word. She would have to hide something that was not a word at all, something that lived in no anthology and that no minister could look up, because it had only ever existed on one floor in one house, between two people, and the house was gone.
She closed her eyes, and the floor came back.
It was winter, and she was five, and the floor of the reading room was warm under her knees, because her father had had the flues laid the old way, under the stone. He was kneeling beside her with a brush and a bowl of water. That was how he taught her characters: in water, on the heated floor, so that every stroke dried and vanished as she watched, and her mistakes did not matter, because a moment later they were gone.
She had been crying, because her own name was too hard.
It had fifteen strokes, which seemed to her at five an unreasonable number for a name. Every time she tried it the pieces came out in the wrong places, and the floor drank them before she could see where she had gone wrong.
“It isn’t one character,” her father said. “That’s your mistake. It’s a little story. Look.” He wet the brush and drew, at the top, two short crossed strokes, and two more beside them. “Grass.” Beneath that he drew a box with a line through it and a spine down the middle. “A cart. The cart is carrying the grass. And underneath…” A long sweeping stroke from the left, running beneath the cart and out to the right like a road leaving a village. “…is the road it’s travelling on. Grass, cart, road. That’s all a lotus is.”
She had looked at it. 蓮. The water was already shrinking at the edges.
“Where’s it going?” she asked.
He considered the question with the seriousness he gave to questions from envoys.
“Wherever you are,” he said. “That’s the point of a name.”
She opened her eyes. The candle had burned down a finger’s width.
Grass, cart, road: three characters every child knew, which no minister would look at twice. Put them at the heads of three lines and they meant nothing. Read them as pictures, the way a five-year-old had read them on a warm floor, and they made her name.
That would tell him she was alive. What else to tell him took the rest of the night.
She wrote the safe poem first, because it was the sensible thing to do and she was, most of the time, a sensible person. Grass, cart and road, and then a fourth line beginning with 存, survives. The word could stand in a state poem without anyone blinking: Dongdan survives, friendship survives the sea. To her father it would say the rest. She finished the line with something harmless about old friendship and read the poem back.
It was a good poem. It would get past Yuzhi. It told him she was alive. It also told him, in every line, that she was perfectly well where she was. He would read it somewhere alone, and be glad, and fold it away next to his skin, and bow to the Japanese in the prince’s name, and sail home, and go on serving. She is safe, he would think. Better not to disturb anything.
He would never come.
She looked at it until she hated it.
She was not perfectly well. The person who had once told her where a lotus was going had been alive the whole time and had not come. He didn’t know, she told herself. Nobody had told him. That was not the same as not coming. She told herself so twice, and it was true both times, and it did not help at all.
She scraped the last line off the paper with the edge of her knife, and sat for a long while with the dry brush in her hand.
Then she wrote what she actually wanted to say to him.
草衰遼水北
車轉海門東
道遠孤帆影
存心一寸紅
The grass is withering north of the Liao;
the carts are turning east at the sea’s gate.
The road is long: a single sail’s shadow.
Keep in your heart one inch of red.
In the old poems a heart was an inch across, and a loyal one was red all the way through. Put inch and red side by side and nobody who had ever read a poem could help seeing a loyal heart. A Japanese courtier would read the line as Dongdan’s warm friendship for Japan. Yuzhi would read it as a Balhae child flattering her masters, and approve.
But at Sanggyeong, in summer, the lotus buds on the palace ponds stood about an inch out of the water before they opened, and they were red. Her father had held her up at the rail of the bridge once to count them, and they had lost count together somewhere after forty. Every reader in two empires would see a heart. Her father would see a lotus bud, and know whose it was.
Come and get me.
She did not know how he could. She was ten, not stupid.
She copied the poem out fair. Then, because she had made a bargain and she kept her bargains, she did Ruan’s exercise badly, five times over, with the third line drifting uphill and the character for yellow squashed in the middle, and put it where he would find it under the window. Then she blew out the candle and lay down on the matting in the dark, and watched the windows until they went grey.
Yelü Yuzhi read the poem standing at his window, the way he read grain accounts: once quickly, for the total, and once slowly, for the theft.
His office was across the yard from the library, a narrow room lined with pigeonholes, each with a little wooden tag in Khitan script. It smelled of ink and cold. He did not invite her to sit, and there was nothing in the room she could have sat on without her feet dangling, so she was grateful.
“Four lines,” he said. “Twenty characters. No forbidden names. Tones correct.” He lowered the sheet a little. “The Liao, in the first line.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“North of the Liao is the steppe. The Emperor’s country. The homeland of the Khitan.” His voice stayed perfectly even. “And you have written that the grass there is withering.”
She had guarded against everything but that.
“Grass withers everywhere in autumn, my lord,” she said. “North of the Liao and south of it. The embassy leaves in autumn.”
He considered this.
“And if someone were to show the line to the Emperor and say, Here is the prince’s Balhae child, writing that the Khitan homeland is dying?”
“Then they’d have to show him the next line as well, my lord,” she said. “That one’s nice about him. The carts are taking his friendship over the sea.” She heard her own voice going quick and pleased, and could not stop it. “And you have to put the season in. If it said the grass was green in autumn, everyone would think whoever wrote it had never been outside. My father says it isn’t a proper poem if you can’t tell what month it is.”
She heard it a moment after he did.
“Says,” said Yuzhi.
“Said, my lord.” It came out much too fast.
“Said,” Yuzhi agreed, in the tone of a man correcting an entry in a ledger, and lowered his eyes to the poem again, and she watched his finger move to the top of the first column and travel, one by one, along the heads of the lines.
Grass. Cart. Road.
It stopped on the fourth.
“存,” he said. “Why that?”
“Because Dongdan endures, my lord.”
The silence went on long enough for a cart to rattle across the yard outside, and for a dog to bark at it, and for Ryeon to count, without wanting to, the four steps between her and the door. Four of his steps. Seven of hers.
“Good,” said Yuzhi, and handed back the sheet. “See that it does.”
The prince copied the poem out that afternoon, in his own hand, on heavy southern paper flecked with gold. Ryeon heard about it from Hulan, who had heard it from the steward, who said His Highness had made two copies and torn up the first because he disliked how the third line sat on the page.
Ruan’s exercise came back two mornings later, before light, pushed through the fourth window with three honey cakes wrapped in a cloth and a note on top in a hand that was his own, and terrible: 好. Good. It had taken him two tries; she could see the first one scratched out underneath, where he had put the girl on the wrong side of the child.
She ate one cake and put the other two by for Hulan, and found she was smiling at the scratched-out character, and stopped.
The embassy left that morning, at first light.
She watched from the library’s east window, the third of the six, standing on the stool, with Hulan pressed beside her, because Hulan never missed anything that involved horses. The yard below filled slowly with men and animals and breath. Grooms led out the packhorses. Clerks came and went with lacquer boxes on their shoulders. Someone dropped a bundle of sable pelts in the mud and was shouted at in three languages.
“My aunt says people are coming from the steppe at the New Year,” Hulan said, watching the pelts being gathered up. “To count everything, horses and furs and sacks and us, and some of them from the Emperor and some from the old empress. The one with one hand.”
Everyone knew about the hand. When the old emperor died, his widow had sent hundreds of his officials after him into the grave to serve him there, until one of them answered that no one had been closer to the emperor than his own wife. She had said that her sons were too young to be left. Then she had cut off one of her hands at the wrist and had it laid in the tomb in her place. The kitchen girls told it to frighten each other in the dark, and it worked.
“Your aunt says a great many things,” said Ryeon.
“She’s usually right, though.” Hulan leaned out further. “Which one’s the ambassador?”
Ryeon had already found him. She had found him the moment he came through the gate, before she could even see his face: something in his walk, the slight forward lean, as if he were always going into a wind. He was greyer than she remembered, and thinner, and smaller, or else she was bigger; it was hard to tell. He wore a dark Khitan riding coat over his court robe, and it did not suit him.
They must have brought him back from the north for this. For three years he would have been somewhere out on the steppe with the other Balhae officials the Khitan had carried home with them, and now they needed the one Balhae face the Japanese would know. He would have been lodged in the secretariat quarter, on the far side of the city: three walls and a market away. She had not set foot outside this house since the road south. Nobody had told him she was here. She could see that in the way he stood. He was not looking for anything.
“The one by the grey horse,” she said.
Hulan looked. “He’s old.”
“He’s fifty-four.”
“He looks sad.”
“He’s crossing the sea in winter,” Ryeon said. “I’d look sad.”
Below them her father stood beside the grey horse while a groom checked the girth. He did not look up at the windows. There was no reason he should. As far as he knew, his daughter was dead.
It came to her, watching him, that a daughter kept in the conqueror’s library was the sort of thing you could use to make an envoy behave. We have her; be careful what you say. Nobody had said it. She added why not to her list.
Some night, far away on the other side of the sea, he would unroll a poem and find out.
Or he would never unroll it. Or he would read it and not see. He was tired, and he had not knelt on a warm floor with a bowl of water for five years.
“Do you know him?” Hulan asked.
“No,” said Ryeon.
Her father put his foot in the stirrup and swung up, stiffly, like a man who has never liked horses. The gate opened. The embassy went out in a long uneven file, the last packhorse went through, and the gate closed behind it.
She kept both hands on the sill. She stood at the window until the yard was empty and Hulan had grown bored and gone, and then she went back to the laments and copied four lines without seeing any of them.
The prince came to the library that evening.
He had never come in while she was there. She had seen him perhaps a dozen times in three years, always at a distance: crossing the inner court with his sleeves tied back, riding out with his falconers, standing motionless at the edge of a banquet as if someone had painted him into it. She had copied his letters and his book lists and once, memorably, a long and furious complaint to a southern dealer about a forged calligraphy scroll. She knew his handwriting far better than his face.
He came in without the steward, closed the door behind him, and stood looking at the shelves as though counting them.
Ryeon scrambled down off her stool and bowed. He waved her back up onto it, which was kind of him, or else he simply preferred her face at the height of the desk.
Yelü Bei was thirty that year, and smaller than the stories made him. The stories made him a giant, because they needed someone large enough to have given away an empire. In fact he was a man of middle height with a tired, clever face and a scholar’s stoop, and when he came closer she saw that the creases of his fingers were dark with ink. It was not a clerk’s black. It was the soft grey wash a painter uses for distance, and for snow.
She was making the archive copy of the poem for Yuzhi’s shelves. He stood behind her and looked at it.
“I copied this out the day before yesterday,” he said. “For the Japanese.” His Chinese was the Chinese of a man who had learned it from books and loved it, precise and a little old-fashioned, and he spoke it to her exactly as he would have spoken it to one of his ministers, which nobody had done in her life. “When I copy a poem I read it twice: once with the eye and once with the hand. The hand is the slower reader. It notices things.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“I paint, you know. Horses, chiefly. Snow. I was a lamentable student at your age. My tutors despaired of me, because I could never look at a character without seeing the picture inside it. I used to compose riddles out of them and leave them in my brothers’ boots.” He reached past her shoulder and, lightly, as you might touch a sleeping horse, set one ink-grey fingertip on the top of the first column. “Grass.”
Her brush had stopped.
He touched the top of the second. “A cart.”
And the third. “A road.”
A bead of ink was gathering at the tip of her brush. She could feel the weight of it. She could not make her hand move to lift it away.
“Lotus,” said Yelü Bei. “That’s very good.”
The bead fell. It struck the paper at the head of the third column, over the character for road, and spread there, black and round and patient, until the road was gone.
He regarded the blot with what seemed to be genuine interest. Then he looked at her, a ten-year-old on a cushion on a stool, with ink on her sleeves and apricot on her chin, as though she were a book he had bought without opening and had only just begun to read.
“I wonder,” he said, “whether your father is as good a reader as you.”
He went out. The door closed behind him without a sound. Ryeon sat alone with the archive copy in front of her and the road in the third line drowned in ink, and for the first time in three years she did not know how many ways out there were.