Chapter Ten
The Sea Gate
Dongping. Winter, 930
On the nineteenth the river had reeds on both banks.
Ryeon read him the basket while he painted them. A horse levy. A petition about a bridge. A poem on the first snow from the same minor official as last winter, which was worse, so that the prince said “Twice,” without looking up, and she read it twice. He laid in the far shore with a brush so dry it barely marked the paper.
When the basket was empty she went to Lady Gao.
Lady Gao was kneeling at her writing table with a square of blue silk, wrapping the lotus tile. She folded the silk over the six petals one corner at a time, the way the kitchen folded dumplings, and tucked the last corner under.
Ryeon took the pass out of her coat and laid it on the table where the tile had been.
“The new officer won’t lift the grille at night without Lord Yuzhi’s paper,” she said. “That’s Lord Yuzhi’s paper.”
Lady Gao read it. She read it a second time, which she did not usually do, and touched the red square at its foot with one finger.
“The bearer and those with him,” she said.
“I’m the bearer. I’ll go in Choe Ung’s boat, with the lacquer.”
Lady Gao turned the pass a little toward the window, and her sleeve slipped back from her wrist as she did it.
“Why are you going?” said Ryeon.
It was out before she had decided to say it, and she would have liked it back. Lady Gao drew the sleeve down again.
“Because my packets go to Goryeo,” said Lady Gao, “and Choe Ung can cross to Goryeo from Dengzhou, and from here, after tomorrow night, he cannot.”
“You’re not on the list,” said Ryeon. “You never were.”
“No.” Lady Gao did not ask how she knew. “I told him I was coming. I went on telling him until it was true.” She held out the wrapped tile. “Hold this.”
Ryeon held it. It was heavier than it looked, and cold through the silk.
Lady Gao looked toward the door, as if she could already see the prince beyond it, waiting for a difficulty to be taken away. Then she took the pass and went out.
She was gone a while. When she came back she gave the pass to Ryeon and said only, “He will use it.”
Ryeon put the pass back inside her coat.
“Lord Yuzhi says I’m not to go near my father,” she said. “Not once. Until the prince goes.”
“Then you had better not be seen.” Lady Gao took the tile back from her and set it on her stack of letters, silk and all, where it had always been. “The archive will want the register of the Dragon Spring district for the year of the fall. You will take it to the envoy. He is cataloguing. There will be a guard on the door; he is Yuzhi’s, but he takes silver from everyone, and I have given him some. You will have the time it takes to burn one stick of incense.” She looked at Ryeon. “The archive has a heated floor.”
Ryeon could not speak.
“I know,” said Lady Gao. “I will have them light it this afternoon.”
The archive was a long low building against the west wall, with shelves to the ceiling and a single lamp, and it smelled of old paper and dust and, under that, faintly, of the warm stone under the floor. The guard on the door was a broad Balhae man in a Khitan coat, with a face that had nothing written on it. He looked at her, and at the register in her arms, and stood aside to let her in, and left the door open behind her. He stood just outside it, in the passage, with his back to the jamb, where he could hear every word.
Not once, Lord Yuzhi had said. She had counted her steps across the court from the library, out of habit, and there had been a great many more than a hundred of them, and now there were none left. She went in.
Her father was sitting on the floor at the far end of the room, cross-legged among stacks of scrolls, writing labels.
He looked up when she came in. She saw him see a child with a register, a little scribe from the king’s house, and begin to look down again. Then she saw him stop.
He was older than he had been a year ago, in the yard below her window, with the grey horse. Thinner. There was more grey in his hair, and his face had gone lined and brown from the crossing home and an autumn on the coast. But he still sat leaning forward, a little, the way she remembered.
She had thought about this moment every night since the summer. She had thought about running down the length of the room, and about what she would say, and about whether he would know her at all. She had not thought that she would simply stand in the doorway holding a register of the Dragon Spring district, unable to move her feet.
“The register you requested, sir,” she said, in Chinese. Her voice came out very small and very correct. “From the library. For the year of the fall.”
“Thank you.” His voice was the same. Formal, a little dry, with the long vowels of the capital. “Bring it here, if you would. I shall need to check it against the archive copy. It may take some time.”
She walked down the length of the room between the shelves, and knelt on the floor across from him, and put the register down between them. The floor was warm under her knees. He had a small bowl of water beside him for wetting his brush, and he moved it, without looking at it, so that it sat between them too.
Neither of them looked at the door.
“The first chapter,” said her father, aloud, turning the register to face him, “lists the households. You will read me the totals, please, while I compare.”
“Yes, sir,” said Ryeon.
He dipped his brush in the water. He did not look at her. He looked at the register, and with his other hand, low down on the warm floor beside his knee, where the guard in the doorway could not see, he wrote one character in water.
蓮
She watched it go. It took three breaths. The edges went first, the way they always had, and then the long stroke of the road underneath, and then the grass on top, and then there was only the warm stone.
“Four hundred and twelve households,” she read aloud, from the register. Her voice shook on twelve, and she let it, because the guard would only hear a child who was nervous in front of an official. Then she put her finger in the water bowl and wrote beside her own knee:
父
Her father looked at it until it was gone.
“Four hundred and twelve,” he said aloud, steadily. “The archive copy has four hundred and nine. Go on.”
They did it that way for the length of a stick of incense.
Aloud, in Chinese, she read him the households of the Dragon Spring district in the last year of Balhae, village by village, with their numbers of men and women and children and oxen, and he compared them with the archive copy, and said Go on, and Three fewer, and once, sharply, That cannot be right, read it again, so that the guard in the doorway shifted his feet and then settled.
And between them, on the warm floor, in water, they talked.
They wrote small, and fast, and one or two characters at a time, because the floor drank everything in three breaths. She had forgotten how quickly it went. She had forgotten that you had to read it as it was written, all at once, with your whole attention, or it was gone and you could not get it back.
The red, she wrote. Was the lotus.
He stopped with his brush in the air. The guard said nothing. Ryeon read out the oxen of a village called Black Water.
Not a heart, she wrote. A lotus. On the pond. Keep me. And then, because she had carried it for more than a year and could not carry it any longer: Come and get me.
It dried.
Her father sat looking at the place where it had been for a long time. Long enough that she had to read the oxen of Black Water twice over, and the guard in the doorway coughed. Then he dipped his brush.
I read a heart, he wrote.
He wiped the wet brush against the rim of the bowl.
I wanted you to mean it, he wrote.
The last character was drying before he took his hand away.
And then, slowly, one character, which stayed on the warm stone a little longer than the others because he pressed hard:
Sorry.
Her finger was in the bowl before she had decided anything.
不來
Didn’t come.
She put her palm flat on it and rubbed, hard, before it could even begin to dry, until there was nothing on the stone but a smear going dull at the edges. When she took her hand away he was looking at it. Not at the floor. At her hand.
She could not read aloud for a moment. She bent her head over the register as if she had lost her place, and the guard in the doorway shifted again, and she found the line, and read the children of Black Water, eleven, in a voice that sounded like somebody else’s.
When she could see again she wrote: The reply from Japan. I read it first.
He looked at her.
You will never tell him, Lady Gao had said, on her warm floor, with the bone knife in her hand. Ryeon put her finger in the water.
I changed it, she wrote.
He did not move. His eyes went to her hand, flat on the warm stone beside the bowl: the two fingertips pink and shiny, the ink still dark in the creases of the rest. Then they came back to her face.
He dipped his brush, and held it over the floor, and wrote nothing for so long that the water ran down to the tip and fell, a single drop, on the stone, and dried.
Then he wrote: You read well.
She bit down hard on the inside of her cheek and read the next village.
There was a great deal left and almost no time.
Ship, she wrote. The prince. The night of the twentieth. Come.
He did not hesitate at all, this time. He wrote one character.
No.
And then, while she read aloud the next village’s oxen: Balhae people here. Four hundred and twelve households. Many like that. He tapped the register with one finger, once, so lightly the guard could not have seen. Someone must stay. Read their names.
She had known he would say no.
She put her finger in the bowl.
I’m going.
He looked at it while it dried. Then he wrote, fast and clear, so that it stood on the warm stone for a breath longer than anything else he had written:
Go.
And again, under it, before the first one had finished drying:
Go.
She looked at the two of them going, one after the other, the edges first.
There was one more thing to tell him. She had been saving it, because she was afraid of what it would do to him.
Mother, she wrote. Goryeo. Maybe.
Her father stopped moving altogether.
A Yang woman, she wrote. A refugee village by the sea. A boy of five. Lady Gao’s merchant.
He wrote nothing. He put the brush down on the edge of the bowl, and put his hand flat on the warm floor where the words had been, and kept it there, as though he could hold them. The guard in the doorway said, in Balhae, not unkindly, “The incense is nearly done, sir.”
“Yes,” said her father aloud, in Chinese. “Thank you. We are nearly at the end of the district.” His voice was steady. Only his hand on the floor was not.
Elder brother? she wrote.
He was a long time answering. He wrote it with his finger, beside his hand: Gate.
She read the next two villages aloud without hearing a word of them.
There was time for one more. He picked up the brush again, and wrote, and it was the last thing, because the incense was a stub of ash and the guard was turning in the doorway:
蓮
The same as the first. Grass, cart, road. The road ran out from under the cart and off to the right like a road leaving a village, and dried there, at the edge, last.
“That will be all,” said her father, aloud. “Thank you. The archive copy is short by six households in the third chapter. I shall note it.” He closed the register and held it out to her across the floor. “You may take this back to the library, little scribe.”
She took it. Their fingers did not touch.
She stood up. Her knees were stiff from the warm floor. She bowed to him, the bow for an official of the fifth grade, which was the bow a library scribe owed an archivist of the king’s household, and he inclined his head in return exactly as an official of the fifth grade should, and she turned and walked back down the length of the room, between the shelves, and out past the guard, who was studying a crack in the ceiling with great attention.
The register was still warm from the floor. She carried it back across the court flat against her chest, and by the time she reached the library it had gone as cold as everything else.
On the twentieth the boat on the river had wind in its sail, and the prince was painting the same wind into the reeds. Ryeon read him the basket. When it was empty she set it on the floor beside her stool, and went across the court to Lord Yuzhi’s office before he could send for her.
He was at his desk with the lamp lit, because the sky had come down low over the city and his office was as dark as a cupboard. The dispatch box stood on the corner, with his seal beside it on its silk. His flat case lay open in front of him, and in it, under a tally stick, lay the list. At his elbow stood the basin where he washed his brushes, with a finger’s depth of grey water in it.
He finished the line he was writing, and laid down his brush, and raised his eyes.
“You read the oxen of Black Water twice,” he said.
Ryeon’s hands, which had been on their way into her coat, stopped there.
“The guard takes silver from everybody,” said Yuzhi. “Including me.” He did not seem angry. He seemed to be adding something up. “Not once, I said.”
She waited for the rest of it. Her father back in the gatehouse. The list in the dispatch box, going north today.
“I will tell you what I can give you instead,” said Yuzhi. “The Dragon Spring district has forty-one registers in the library, and the archive has one cataloguer. Somebody will have to carry them across the court. One a day, there and back, for forty-one days. After that there are the other districts.” He moved his brush on its rest, a little. “A warm floor. A bowl of water. No guard on the door, once the prince has gone.”
Forty-one days. She could see every one of them: the door, the warm stone, the bowl moved over without anybody looking at it. Not once, he had said, and she had gone once; if she sailed, once was all there would ever be.
She took the pass out of her coat and laid it on the desk in front of him.
He read it through, and then held it nearer the lamp.
“This,” he said, “is very nearly my hand.”
She had held it to her own lamp the night before last, and been sure.
“The by is a little heavy at the foot. I make it lighter.” He touched the paper beside the red square, not the square itself. “The seal is mine. Forty baskets of parched millet.”
Her ears went hot. She took out the confession anyway, and laid it beside the pass, and kept her fingers on its foot, where her name was.
He read it. His eyes went down the columns in order, the way they went down everything. Halfway down they stopped on has not spoken with me since the fall of Sanggyeong, and stayed there exactly as long as it took her to remember the oxen of Black Water. He looked at her once. Then he went on to the end, and his eyes stopped on her name.
“Your own hand,” he said. “It leans.”
He sat back.
“A pass is useful,” he said. “Somebody had to make one.”
“You want him to go.”
Somewhere across the court an arrow went into straw, and then another.
“If the prince is taken on this shore,” said Yuzhi, “his brother’s armies come to fetch him, and they stay. If he goes, there is no king in Dongdan to fight over, and there is a boy in this house who is the eldest son of the eldest son, and can grow up.”
He put one finger on the pass. “If you stay, one of the men who sail with the prince made this, and he will not be here to mind. If you go, the list says who made it.” He laid two fingers on the confession, beside hers. “Unless this says otherwise. So this goes in my case, and you stay as well.”
His two fingers and her own lay side by side on the paper.
She could see the mounter’s bench by the east window of the mounting room, and the bowl of paste on it gone hard, with a crack across the top.
“They’ll take me north,” she said.
It came out before she meant it to. Yuzhi looked up.
“Somebody cut that seal off something. So they’ll ask. They’ll ask everybody who works with paper, the way they asked the mounter, and he didn’t come back. His paste is still on his bench.” Her voice was going up, and she could not get it down again. “They’ll ask me. And I’ll tell them. I won’t mean to. I’ll just tell them.”
She could have stopped there. He would have heard a frightened child, and put the confession in his case, and that would have been the end of it.
“About kind to the King,” she said. “And very wide.”
Yuzhi sat quite still. Then, slowly, he turned his head toward the dispatch box on the corner of his desk, and the seal lying ready beside it, as if one of them had spoken. She had never seen him look at anything he had not already counted.
“Kind to the King,” he said.
“It said hard on the King. And the sea was unusually calm. That was the Tang saying come. I made it very wide. On your tracing. And you put your seal on it, and it went to the Emperor.”
Yuzhi got up. He went to the wall of pigeonholes and took a roll down from the one beside the window, without having to search for it.
“I keep very good lists,” he said.
He unrolled it on the desk, over the pass and the confession and her fingers, hand over hand, back through the autumn and the summer and the spring and the New Year, until he came to the tenth month of last year. His finger went down the entries and stopped. He read the line to himself. Then he read it again, aloud, slowly, as he would have read it back to a clerk.
“Tenth month. To the camp. The letter of the Tang emperor to the King: traced, one sheet. Sealed.”
He let go, and a year of lists curled back on itself across the desk and lay still. The lamp flame stood straight up between them, without a flicker.
“Before the month is out,” said Yuzhi at last, to the lamp, “the King of Dongdan lands at Dengzhou, where the Tang has invited him. The Emperor takes out the tracing I sent him, under my seal, and reads that the sea is very wide.” He laid his hand flat on the roll. “And he asks where my eyes were.”
He sat down again, and looked at the confession, and at her fingers on it.
“It was me,” said Ryeon. “Not your eyes.” She drew the paper back across the desk before he could answer, and turned it round. “I’ll put it in.”
She took the smallest brush from the end of his row and wet it on his inkstone. The desk came to the middle of her chest, so she had to write with her elbow in the air. The only room left was at the foot, above her name, and the line sat there small and crowded, like a thing put in at the last moment, which it was.
In the tenth month of last year, while the chief minister was at the north granary, I lifted two phrases off the tracing of the Tang emperor’s letter in his dispatch box, and wrote others in their place.
Wherever the Emperor kept the Tang emperor’s letter now, he would keep her name beside it.
She put the brush back at the small end of his row, where it belonged, and turned the paper round to face him, and laid her fingers on its foot again, under the wet line.
Yuzhi read the new line.
“Careless. With my own box.” It sounded like a heading in one of his lists, and one he had never needed before.
“A forger kept in this house is a witness who can be asked about my dispatch,” he said. “A forger at sea is a confession.”
He held out his hand for it, flat.
“Burn the list,” said Ryeon.
He was still.
“I have a copy.”
“It hasn’t got my father on it.”
“I know his name without this.”
“But it won’t be in the prince’s hand.”
He looked at her for so long that she began, without meaning to, to count the pigeonholes behind his head. She had reached thirty when he took the list out of the case. Under it lay the other sheet, the old one in his own hand, with eleven chests. He left that where it was.
He folded the list once, and held its lower edge to the lamp, over the basin.
The paper browned. A small flame climbed the fold. Her father’s name went first, and then the line above it, Daughter of the Bae house. One. Yuzhi turned the sheet to keep the fire from his fingers. The ink stayed black on the brown paper for a moment, quite readable, before the edge curled away. Flakes of it dropped into the basin and sat on the grey water, and went soft, and sank.
She watched until the twelfth chest was gone.
Then he opened a drawer, and took out a square of window paper, folded once, and fed that to the lamp as well, without unfolding it, and let the ash go into the water after the rest.
“You have made a great deal of work for a great many people, Lady Bae,” he said.
“Yes, my lord.”
She took her fingers off the confession.
He folded it in three and laid it in the case, on top of the eleven chests.
“Your father will catalogue the library,” he said. “There is enough left to occupy him. You will not send him letters. You will not have your name written on anything that comes to this house. If you return, this paper will be waiting for you.” He closed the lid.
She watched the case until she could say, “Yes.”
Then she said, “You asked me in the spring to tell you when.”
He waited.
“Tonight.”
Yuzhi said nothing. He took a tally slip from the bundle beside the dispatch box, and wrote one character on it, small and square, and laid it face down beside the lamp.
“I said I would,” said Ryeon. She had made a bargain in the spring, and she kept her bargains.
“Tonight I count the north granary,” said Yuzhi. “My clerk will remember that.” He picked up the pass, and considered the heavy by once more, and held it out across the desk.
“You will need this.”
She put it inside her coat, and bowed, and went to the door. She had her hand on it when he spoke again.
“The tag on the pigeonhole,” said Yuzhi. “Where I put your poems. You never learned to read it.”
“No, my lord.”
“Books,” said Yuzhi, and picked up his brush.
Late in the afternoon the Emperor’s officers came.
She was on the stool at the east window of the library, with the laments open on the sill and not one line of them read, when the horses came in at the gate. There were six. The riders wore fur hats, and the snow of the north road was caked white on their boots, and from the first lance hung the Emperor’s pennon. They did not get down. Lord Yuzhi’s clerk came out to them without his pine nuts, and bowed to the first rider, and pointed down the hill, and walked out of the gate in front of their horses, and the six of them went after him.
The New Year was more than a month away.
She watched the pennon go down over the roofs of the lower town. It went slowly, because the street was steep and iced, and it went nearly to the bottom, and stopped at the guesthouse for the Emperor’s men, at the top of the lane that ran down to the water gate.
After a while the clerk came back up the hill alone, faster than he had gone down, and went in at Lord Yuzhi’s door.
The pennon stayed where it was until the light went.
On the night of the twentieth she left the ink-cake box where it had always been, under the board behind the eleventh shelf, with Lord Yuzhi’s tags in it and her own three characters at the bottom. She left the library by the door. Then she went out into the inner court with the pass and the prince’s letter inside her coat, two papers that crackled when she breathed.
The house was dark. It had been dark since the second drum. But it was not asleep. She could feel it not being asleep, as you can feel a horse awake in a stall. Somewhere behind the storeroom, men she could not see were carrying something heavy, carefully, with rope; she heard the rope creak, and a low word in Khitan, and then nothing. The twelve chests were going. The twelfth would be last: the short one, with the inkstone in it, and under the inkstone the Tang emperor’s letter, with the letter of state that Japan had not read and the fair copy of her poem in its ribbon, which she had watched the prince lay there with his own hands that afternoon before the steward sealed the chest again. Lady Gao had gone an hour ago, with one bundle and her lotus tile wrapped in blue silk, and had touched Ryeon’s head once in the dark of the passage, without a word, on her way out. Hulan had not come to say goodbye. Ryeon had not expected her to.
She went across the court toward the side gate, the small one by the stable, where Lady Gao had told her to go. There was a late moon, well past full, just clearing the wall. The swept snow was blue in it.
Ruan was standing by the stable door.
He was in his coat, with his bow case on his back, and his breath was smoking in the cold. He had been there for some time, she could tell; there was frost on his hat. When he saw her he only stood there, between her and the side gate.
Behind him, round the corner of the stable, she could hear two men talking in low voices. The night watch: Lord Yuzhi’s men, who walked the inner court every night from the second drum to the fifth. If Ruan called out now, they would be round the corner in ten breaths.
She stopped.
“You’re going,” said Ruan. He said it quite quietly.
“Yes.”
“I gave it to her.” He was looking at the snow. “The list. I gave it to my mother.”
“I know.”
He kicked at the snow. “He’s already gone. My father. Down to the river. I watched.” He kicked it again. “He didn’t come and say anything.”
She put her hand inside her coat, and found the prince’s letter by its seal, and held it out.
“He did,” she said. “He said it in this. He told me to give it to you tonight.”
For a moment Ruan did not take it. Then he took it. He broke the seal with his thumb and unfolded it, there in the moonlight in the swept court, and held it very close to his face, the way he held everything he was trying to read.
She watched his lips move.
Ruan.
Father goes out. Son does not go out.
Heaven is big. Earth is big.
He frowned at the next line. His lips went mountain, up, one, person, and stopped, and went again.
“On the hill,” said Ryeon softly. “One person. Remember the person with the big head, beside the hill? When we wrote your name.”
Ruan’s lips moved on.
Good.
Father.
He read the whole thing again, all sixteen characters, from the top. Then he folded it carefully along its creases and put it inside his coat.
The stable door beside him had gone grey with frost, every board of it, as fine as the fur on a moth. Ryeon put out her finger and wrote on it.
蓮
“That’s the other one,” she said. “The second half of my name. You never got to ask.” She touched each part, and the frost went to water round her finger. “Grass. A cart. A road. My father taught me. On a warm floor, with water, when I was five.”
Ruan looked at it until his breath had fogged half of it away.
Round the corner of the stable the two voices had stopped. She heard boots on the snow. They were coming.
Ruan looked at her.
Then he turned round and walked into the stable, and a moment later the big chestnut came out of it at a dead run, head high, snorting white into the cold, and went straight past the corner where the boots were, and the boots stopped, and two men shouted, and began to run the other way.
Ruan came back out of the stable, rubbing his rope-burned palm.
“Go on,” he said. “He’s fast. They won’t catch him till the fourth drum. Tell my father I read it. By myself. All of it.”
“I will.”
“And tell him…” He stopped. He seemed to have lost whatever came next. In the end he only said, “Tell him I read it,” again, and turned round, and went back into the stable to the dun pony, and stayed there.
She went through the side gate.
The river gate was at the bottom of the lower town, where the city wall came down to the water. It was a water gate: an arch over the river, with a great timber grille that was let down at night, and a gatehouse beside it with its shutters closed and no light in it. In the lane behind the gatehouse a covered cart stood with its shafts down and nobody near it, and something inside it hissed to itself, and was quiet, and hissed again. At the top of the lane, where it met the street, the guesthouse had a line of light under one shutter. The river was late to close that year, and at dusk men with poles had broken the skin of ice along the steps. Below the arch, in the black water, three long river boats lay against the quay, low in the water, loaded. She could see the shapes of the chests under oiled cloth. She could see people sitting in the boats, wrapped and silent: Lady Gao, small and still, in the second boat, and the prince standing in the stern of the first, and Choe Ung at the steering oar of the third, with his parrot under his coat.
There was a lantern at the gate, held by the gate officer.
It was the broad Balhae man from the archive door. His face was as blank as a fresh tally board.
He held out his hand for the pass.
She gave it to him. He bent over it under his lantern, frowning, and held it at arm’s length and then close, like a man who could barely read and did not mean anyone to find out. He could read the seal. He read that for a long time. Then he turned, without a word, and set his lantern on the bollard, and carried the pass into the dark gatehouse, and the door shut behind him.
Nobody on the quay moved.
In the first boat the prince stood in the stern with his face toward the gate, as still as he stood in front of a clean sheet. In the second, Lady Gao had brought one hand out of her sleeve and was holding the side of the boat, and nothing else about her moved. Water knocked under the hulls. A rope creaked against a post and stopped. On the steps the broken ice had begun, very quietly, to knit itself back together; she could see it happening, a thin grey skin creeping out from the stone between one breath and the next.
She counted, because it was that or shout. Twenty breaths. Forty. The cold came up through the soles of her boots and into her knees.
She had kept her bargain. She did not know whether he kept his.
Far up in the town, men were shouting about a horse. At the top of the lane the guesthouse door opened, and a lantern came out with a fur hat under it, and stood there swinging a little, as if whoever held it were listening. Then it went off up the street toward the shouting, after the chestnut.
Sixty breaths. The lantern did not come back. In the third boat the parrot said something under Choe Ung’s coat, and Choe Ung put his hand over the lump it made. Eighty.
Then, from inside the dark gatehouse, a voice spoke in Khitan, low and level, and she knew it: Lord Yuzhi’s voice, the one he used for millet.
“It’s in order. Open it.”
The door opened. The officer came out without the pass, and took up his lantern, and went to the windlass, and looked at nobody.
The grille went up with a long groan of ropes and timber. Ryeon went down the quay steps to the third boat, over the new skin of ice, which broke under her boots like sugar. Choe Ung put out a hand and lifted her in over the side without a word and set her down among the chests, and the parrot under his coat said something rude in Japanese, and he hushed it.
The first boat pushed off. The prince stood in the stern with his face to the river, a dark shape against the moon, and kept it there.
The second boat, with Lady Gao.
Then theirs. Choe Ung leaned on the steering oar, and the quay slid away, and the black water opened between the boat and the steps, and the arch of the gate went over them, cold and dripping and close enough that she could have put up her hand and touched the stone.
She did not look back. She had decided not to. She sat among the chests with her knees drawn up and the empty place over her heart where the letter and the pass had been, and looked at the river ahead, where it widened and went pale under the moon.
Then, from somewhere behind them, inside the water gate, there came a sound.
It was a great white racket of honking, eleven voices, outraged and enormous in the frozen night, and a girl’s voice in Khitan, loud and bored and put-upon, shouting at them to get back here this minute, you stupid birds, and the sound of feet running along the bank, and the honking going with them.
The cart had been full of geese.
Somebody would see her. Tomorrow Hulan would still be there to be asked.
Ryeon turned round.
She could not see anything. Only the black shape of the wall against the stars, and the lantern at the gate, getting smaller. But she sat in the bottom of the boat, turned round, with her chin on the edge of the nearest chest, and listened to the geese until the river bent and the city was gone, and she could not hear them any more.
