Chapter Eleven
The Books
The mouth of the Liao. Winter, 930
They came down the river for two nights and a day.
Ryeon slept, in the end, among the chests in the bottom of Choe Ung’s boat, under a sheepskin that smelled of parrot. When she woke it was grey, and the river had stopped being a river. It had spread out flat and wide and pale on both sides, between banks of reeds taller than a man, and the reeds were bent over all one way by a wind that came off something she could smell before she could see it: salt, and mud, and a cold that was different from the cold of the land.
She sat up and looked, and knew it.
Wide and flat and grey, running out to something that might have been the sea, with reeds along the near bank bent over by the wind. She had watched it come out of bare paper for three mornings, at the end of the long table, while she read the basket aloud. He had painted it from memory, or from something he had been told.
The boats came out of the reeds at full light into a wide brown bay. A ship was lying there at anchor, waiting. It was much larger than Choe Ung’s little trader: a broad-beamed sea-going ship with high sides and a deckhouse at the stern and a tall new mast. She had written about that mast to Yuzhi in early summer. She had never once, in all the safe poems, imagined actually standing under it.
They did not go straight aboard.
The prince’s boat put in first to a low spit of shingle and frozen sand at the edge of the bay, where the reeds gave out. Two of his men jumped down into the shallows and hauled it up. Then they went back to the boat and lifted out a long pale timber, a spare spar from the ship by the look of it, squared off and smoothed, and carried it up the beach on their shoulders to a place just above the tide line. They dug a hole there in the frozen sand with an iron bar, which took a long time, and set the timber upright in it, and packed the sand round its foot, and stamped it down.
Then they stood back, and the prince walked up the beach alone with a knife in his hand.
Ryeon watched from the boat. Nobody had told her to stay in it, and nobody had told her to get out, so she stayed, and watched, with her chin on the gunwale. She saw him stand in front of the post for a while, as he stood in front of a clean sheet before he painted, looking at it. Then he reached up and began to cut.
It took him most of an hour. The wood was hard and the cold was in it and he was not a carver. Twice he stopped, and stood back, and once he put his hand to his mouth where the knife had slipped. When he had finished he stepped away and stood still, with the knife hanging at his side. After a while Lady Gao got down out of the second boat and walked up the beach and stood beside him. They stood there together in the wind with their backs to the boats.
Ryeon got out of the boat.
Choe Ung said nothing. He only lifted her down over the side into the shallows, which came over the tops of her boots and were so cold she gasped, and she waded ashore and walked up the beach to the post and stood a little way off from the prince, because she was his reader, and there was something written down, and it was what she was for.
He did not look round. But he moved a little to one side, so that she could see.
It was cut deep into the pale wood in four columns, in the prince’s own hand, made rough and square by the knife.
小山壓大山
大山全無力
羞見故鄉人
從此投外國
The little mountain presses on the big mountain.
The big mountain has no strength left at all.
Ashamed to face the people of my homeland,
from here I go to a foreign country.
She read it once, for the total.
It was a terrible poem. She knew that at once, with the part of her that had been reading verse since before she lost her front teeth. Its tones were wrong. It said everything straight out, the opposite of a fish under ice. It was the poem of a man who could write beautiful verse whenever he wished, and had decided, this once, not to. The little mountain was his younger brother, the Emperor. The big mountain was himself, the elder, the one who should have been. Anybody in the empire would see it in a breath. His brother would see it. His mother would have a copy read to her, and hold it in the hand that was left to her.
She read it again, slowly, for the theft.
The little mountain presses on the big mountain. 小山壓大山. She looked at it the way her father had taught her to look at things on a warm floor, not as words but as pictures, and the first line came apart under her eyes and fell back together again into something else.
山. A mountain: three peaks, the middle one tallest. She had seen it every morning for a year, in pale green celadon, beside his inkstone, with a wet brush lying across it.
And one mountain set on top of another made 出.
She turned to the prince.
He was still looking at the post. But he must have felt her looking, because he said, without turning his head, “Well, reader.”
“Ruan asked me to tell you something,” she said. “He said to tell you he read it. By himself. All of it.” The sea in her boots had begun to burn. “And that he can read.”
For a while the prince only looked at the post.
“Then he will read this,” he said.
It took her a moment to understand why Lady Gao turned round. Then she heard it too: hooves on the frozen sand, a long way off, small and quick.
There was a low rise above the shore, behind the reeds, where the land went up a little from the flats before it went on, flat again, toward Dongdan. On top of it, against the white sky, was a rider. A small one, on a small shaggy dun pony, sitting up straight, holding the reins too tightly in both fists. A little way behind him, on the big chestnut, sat a groom who looked as if he had been riding for two nights and had not been asked whether he wanted to.
He came no closer. He sat there on the top of the rise, quite still, with his bow case on his back and his breath smoking, and looked down at the post, and the boats, and the ship with its new mast, and his father.
The prince stood looking up at him.
Ryeon could not see his face. She could only see his back, and his shoulders, and the knife still hanging from his hand. He did not wave, or call out, or walk up the beach toward the rise. He only stood there, for so long that the men by the boats began to shift and look at each other, and Lady Gao put her hand on his sleeve and then took it away again.
On the hill, one person.
Then the prince turned round, and walked down the beach to the boats, past her, without looking at her, and climbed into the first boat, and sat down in the stern with his back to the shore.
On the rise, the small rider stayed where he was, with the reins in both fists.
They went out to the ship. There were forty of them, counting her; she counted them up the side. The prince. Lady Gao. Eighteen of the prince’s guard. Seven of his household, the ones who were books: a physician, two calligraphers, the mounter’s apprentice, a falconer with a hooded bird on his fist, a cook, and the prince’s old tutor, whom she had never seen, carried up the side in a chair. Choe Ung and his ten sailors. A boy who belonged to Choe Ung. And her.
The chests came up after them on ropes, one by one, swinging out from the boats over the brown water and up the ship’s high side and in again. Twelve. She counted those too. Each took about as long as it takes to boil a goose egg, and so the morning went.
The ropes had frozen in the night, and between chests the sailors beat them against the rail until they would run. They were Silla men, most of them, small and hard and quick, and they swore in Silla speech as they hauled, words she had never heard but understood perfectly. The sun came up somewhere behind the white sky and made a pale place in it, like a lamp behind window paper, and gave about as much warmth. Ryeon’s boots had frozen stiff where the sea had got into them. Her feet had gone from hurting to nothing, which was worse, and when she stamped on the planks she could not feel the stamping.
Each time a chest swung up between her and the shore she waited for it to pass, and looked. The post stood above the tide line, a pale stroke. On the rise the small rider was still there, with the groom behind him on the chestnut. Once the chestnut put its head down to look for grass under the frost, and was pulled up again. The prince stood by the deckhouse with his back to the shore and watched the chests.
The twelfth chest came up last. It was smaller than the others, and heavier, because of the inkstone. It came up over the side, and swung, and the man on the rope above it slipped on the icy deck and let go.
The chest dropped the last two feet and hit the deck on one corner.
The lacquer cracked with a sound like a slap. The lid sprang. Out over the frozen planks went three calligraphy models in their silk covers, and a box of seals that burst open and threw them across the deck like dice, little bronze ones and little jade ones, and the inkstone from Duanzhou in its wooden case, which skidded to the rail and stopped. The papers that had lain under it stayed in the bottom of the chest.
Nobody moved.
The prince walked across the deck from the deckhouse, through the scattered seals, and bent, and picked up the inkstone in its case. He opened the case. The stone inside was not broken. He closed the case again.
Then he looked at the sailor who had let go of the rope.
He was a young man, a Silla boy of perhaps eighteen, standing with his hands still raised in front of him where the rope had been, and his face had gone the colour of the sky. He began to say something in Silla speech, fast, and stopped.
“Twenty,” said the prince, in Khitan, to the captain of his guard. His voice was pleasant. It was the voice he had used a year ago for four grooms and some oats, without lifting his brush. “Here. Now. Before we sail.”
Choe Ung came forward. “Your Highness. My man, this one. The deck is ice. Any man might…”
“Twenty,” said the prince again, without looking at him, “or thirty. You may choose, merchant. You have been very useful, and I like you.”
Choe Ung stood still. Then he stepped back.
They did it at the mast. Ryeon did not watch the sailor. She had decided, the moment she understood what was going to happen, that she would not watch the sailor; that much she could give him. So she watched the prince instead.
He stood by the deckhouse with the inkstone case held against his chest in both hands, and watched it all. Every stroke. He did not look away once. His face was not angry. It was interested. It was the same face he had turned on her in the library, the night the ink fell on road.
Beside him Lady Gao had turned away to the rail, toward the sea. Her right hand was holding her left arm through the sleeve, just above the wrist, quite hard, where the marks were.
Ryeon stood among the scattered seals and counted the strokes. She got to twenty. Then the captain of the guard stepped back, and two of Choe Ung’s men took the boy below, and the prince turned and went into the deckhouse with the inkstone, and the door closed behind him.
She knelt down on the cold deck and began to pick up the seals, one by one, and put them back in their box. After a while Choe Ung came and knelt beside her and helped, without a word. They were tiny, and some had gone under the rail, and some into the cracks between the planks. She had counted thirty-two as they scattered. She found thirty-one.
A white cup with a dark ring in the bottom of it. The little cuts inside Lady Gao’s wrist. She knew now whose it had been.
She put the thirty-first seal in the box and closed the lid.
They sailed a little after noon, on the ebb.
The sailors went up the new mast and loosed the great brown sail, and it filled with a crack she felt in her teeth, and the ship leaned over and began to move. Ryeon went to the stern rail, where nobody was, and stood on a coil of rope so that she could see over it.
The shore went away. The reeds became a line, and the post on the shingle became a pale mark, and then a speck, and then nothing she could be sure of.
But the rise stayed. It was higher than the shore, and the sky was white behind it, and for a long time after the post was gone she could still see the small dark shape on top of it, sitting motionless on a small shaggy pony. Then, just as she had begun to think she had imagined it, the shape moved. It came down off the rise, slowly, at a walk, through the reeds toward the shore. Toward the place where the post was.
She lost it in the reeds.
She stood on the coil of rope and watched the place where it had gone until the whole shore was only a grey line between the brown sea and the white sky, and then until there was no line at all. She pictured him getting down off the pony at the foot of the post, and standing in front of it, and putting his face very close to it, the way he did when he was trying to read something, and moving his lips. Small, mountain. Big, mountain.
The crossing took six days. It was rough. Ryeon was sick for three of them, in a corner of the deckhouse wrapped in Choe Ung’s sheepskin, and on the fourth she was well enough to sit up and be sick over the side instead, which Choe Ung said was a great improvement and a sign that she would make a sailor yet.
On the second night, with her cheek on the boards and the boards going up and down, she wondered whether her father had been sick like this all the way to Japan, and on which day it had stopped.
For four days the prince did not speak to her. He sat in the deckhouse with the chests and read. On the fifth day, when the sea was calmer, he sent for her. She went in, and he handed her a scroll without a word, and she sat on the floor of the deckhouse and read it to him aloud, while he looked out of the little window at the sea. It was the Songs of Chu. The part about the man who was sent away from his country and wandered by the river, and would not come home. When she had finished, he held out his hand, and she rolled up the scroll and gave it to him, and got up to go.
“You did not watch the sailor,” he said.
She had her hand on the door. Outside, the captain of his guard was walking the deck, nine steps to the rail and nine back. She had been counting them without meaning to.
“No, Your Highness.”
“You watched me.”
“I was on your list,” she said. “At the bottom of the twelfth chest. I wanted to see what you did when it got dropped.”
Nine steps to the rail. Nine back.
The prince turned from the window. His hand was on the inkstone case beside him. He seldom gave her the whole of his face, and there was nothing in it she had not seen on the deck.
“Now you have seen,” he said. “And you are still in my deckhouse. Explain.”
She took her hand off the door.
“You were going away,” she said. “You were a door. I looked for years, and there wasn’t another one.”
There was a village by the sea in Goryeo, and a woman of the Yang house in it, and a boy of five, and from Dengzhou Choe Ung could sail there. She did not say so. She had heard what he thought a hostage was for.
“I’ll read for you,” she said. “Everything that comes. I’ll tell you what it says, and what it doesn’t.” The ship climbed a long slope of water and slid down the far side, and she put her hand flat on the wall. “And I’ll count.”
“Count what?”
Outside, the boots had stopped. She could not tell how near the door.
“Doors,” she said.
The prince put his head a little on one side.
“A man who turns round in the saddle to shoot,” he said, “has to let go of the reins. It can be done at the gallop. I have seen a great many men fall off.” He held out the Songs of Chu. “Again. From the river.”
She took it, and sat down on the floor, and unrolled it as far as the river, and began again.
The young sailor was on deck again by the sixth day, hauling rope with his back stiff. He did not look at the deckhouse. Ryeon brought him a cup of water at noon, without saying anything. He took it without saying anything either. That evening Choe Ung found her at the stern rail.
“Lady Gao says you’re crossing to Goryeo,” Ryeon said.
“If I unload quick. Two days, three. The parrot I sell to some fool for half what I paid.” Choe Ung spoke in his stepping-stone mixture of Silla and quay Chinese. “Before the winter shuts it.”
“Will you look for her? The Yang woman. With the boy.”
He looked at Ryeon, then out at the sea.
“The salt village, with the bad dogs. There I begin. What do I give her?”
Ryeon thought for a moment. Then she went into the deckhouse for a scrap of paper and some ink, and came back, and knelt on the deck with the brush from her sleeve, and wrote one character on the scrap in her own hand, which leaned.
蓮
Choe Ung turned the scrap over. “That’s all?”
“She’ll know the name,” said Ryeon. “And if she doesn’t, it isn’t her.”
He folded it small and put it into the fold of his coat, over his heart, where he kept Lady Gao’s packets, and not with the others.
“Tell her I’ll come and get her,” said Ryeon.
On the seventh morning there was land.
Dengzhou was a long grey harbour wall with a town behind it, and hills behind the town, and a great many boats. There were men waiting on the quay. Even from the ship she could see that they were officials: they wore long gowns of dark red and green, and black gauze caps with two stiff tails standing out behind. They stood in two neat rows by rank, and behind them stood soldiers with banners, and behind the soldiers a crowd of people who had come to see the King of Dongdan arrive out of the north, out of the sea, with his books.
The ship came in slowly under oars. The sailors threw lines, and the dockmen caught them, shouting.
And Ryeon, standing at the rail, heard the shouting, and stopped.
It was Chinese. It was the language she had read every day of her life since she was five years old, on warm floors and cold ones, in the Thousand Characters and the Wen Xuan and a thousand grain returns. She had spoken it to the prince and to Yuzhi, and in its slow quay form to Choe Ung on the river wharf. And she could not understand a single word the dockmen were saying.
It went up and down. It swallowed its endings. It had sounds in it she had never heard, and was missing sounds she had always thought were there. It was the Chinese of people who had never needed books, because they lived in it, as a fish lives in water.
She stood at the rail and listened, and did not know where she was.
Lady Gao came and stood beside her.
“It is different,” Lady Gao said, in Balhae, very low. “From the books.”
“Yes.”
“You will learn it.” Lady Gao looked out at the two rows of officials, and the banners, and the crowd. “You learned Khitan from Hulan, and swearing in it in a month. This will be easier. They have no swearing in the South. Only proverbs.”
That made Ryeon laugh, which she had not expected, and then she had to stop, because the gangplank had gone down and the prince was walking down it.
He walked down it alone, first, ahead of everybody, in his best coat, with his books behind him and the sea behind them. He walked down it as she had seen him walk across the inner court at Dongping: unhurried, a little stooped, a scholar with a horseman’s shoulders. At the foot of the gangplank the senior official stepped out of the front row in his red gown and bowed low, and straightened, and unrolled a sheet of yellow paper, and began to read, in a high careful voice that carried right across the harbour.
Ryeon listened to it. It was the Chinese of the books, this time, the old formal kind, and she understood every word. The Emperor of the Great Tang welcomes the King of Dongdan to his realm. The emperor who could not read had sent a letter that somebody else had written, and somebody else again was reading it aloud, to a man who had not asked to hear it. It went on for some time.
She looked at the harbour wall, and the gates in it, and the boats, and the hills behind the town, and began, on purpose, to count the ways out. The water gate at the end of the quay, with soldiers in it. The gate in the wall behind the officials, with more. The road going up between the hills, which might be two roads once she could see the top. The boats, too many to count, which would have to count as one. She got to seven, and kept going. It was a new room. There would be time.
The official finished reading. The prince turned on the quay, and looked back up the gangplank, past the guard and the chests and Lady Gao, until he found her at the rail.
“Reader,” he said.
She went down.
On the quay a Tang clerk with a tally board was counting the King’s household off the ship. He looked at her once, at her size and at the ink on her sleeves, and wrote without asking her name. She read it upside down, because she could not help it.
宮人 一
Palace woman. One.