Chapter Two
The Twelfth Chest
The same night
She sat with the blot until the candle guttered, and lit the second lamp, the one the young lord knew about, and went on sitting with it.
It had dried by then. It was smaller than it had felt when it fell: a round black stain the size of her thumbnail, with a grey halo where the ink had crept into the fibres. Under it the character for road had gone. The other three heads of line stood clear.
Every poem that left the library was copied twice, once for the house and once for Yuzhi’s archive, and this sheet was due on his shelves in the morning. A state poem, blotted at the head of a line. He would want to know how.
The sensible thing was to burn it and make a fresh copy. She had already ground the ink for it when she noticed that the blot was not the only mark on the sheet. She brought the lamp close to be sure.
On the head of the first column lay a small grey whorl. There was another on the head of the second. Where the prince’s fingertip had rested, the painter’s wash in the creases of his skin had come off on the paper. Two fingerprints, one on the grass and one on the cart; where the third would have been, the blot.
She knew what a finger on paper meant. In the land deeds she had copied from the South, men who could not write signed by laying a finger on the page and marking where its joints fell, and in any court in the empire that mark stood for a name. This was the finger itself, every ridge of it, grey as a horse in snow.
The prince had put his hand to her riddle.
If Yuzhi saw this sheet, he would find the prints before he found the blot. He would wonder why the prince had touched the heads of the lines. Then he would read them again, as pictures this time, and after that it would be over for her, and very likely for her father.
Burning it was safer. She knew that. A smudge on a copy she had made could hang her as easily as it could hang a prince, and more easily, since nobody hanged princes. But it was the one thing in Dongdan that tied the prince to her secret, and she found she could not make herself hold it to the flame.
She made the fresh copy instead, slowly and very well, and when it was dry she laid it on the pile for the morning. Then she climbed down, dragged the stool to the shelf by the third door, climbed up again, and took down the scroll of laments from the water-stained Wen Xuan. She folded the blotted sheet once along the middle, unrolled the laments to a place that nobody in the house but her had opened in three years, and rolled the sheet up inside them, and pushed the scroll back into its place.
Only then, with nothing left for them to do, did her hands begin to shake. She sat on them until they stopped.
The steward came for her before the morning rice. He was the prince’s own steward, a broad Khitan in a pleated coat, with a face like a closed shutter, and he always spoke to her in slow, loud Chinese, as if she were not only small but far away.
“You. Painting hall. Now.”
Scribes were not wanted in the painting hall. Nobody was wanted in the painting hall. She followed him across the inner court in the grey early light, past the long stable where the prince’s horses lived a good deal better than his scribes, to a door she had looked at a hundred times and never been through. It had always been barred.
Inside it was cold and bright. The hall had high windows along the south side, covered with paper instead of shutters, so that the light came in white and even, like light off snow. Long tables ran the length of the room. On every table, weighted at the corners with river stones, lay a painting, and every painting was of horses.
Horses at the gallop, manes flattened by a wind you could nearly hear. Horses standing hipshot in snow with their heads low, waiting it out. A herd crossing a river, each animal a few strokes of grey and the river nothing but bare paper. The tables came up to her chest, and she walked between them with her chin almost on the edge, so that the horses went past at eye level, like a real herd going by.
On the last table a Khitan rider had turned right round in the saddle at full gallop to loose an arrow behind him. His face was three strokes. All three were attention.
She stopped in front of him.
“He isn’t finished,” said the prince, from the far end of the hall. “He has nothing to shoot at. I haven’t decided what is following him.”
He was sitting on a low stool with his sleeves tied back and a scroll open across his knees. Beside him on the table stood his inkstone, a water dropper, and a brush rest of pale green celadon made in the shape of a mountain range: three peaks, the middle one tallest, with two wet brushes lying across the gaps between them. The steward bowed himself out and shut the door, and Ryeon was alone with the prince for the second time in her life.
She had decided, somewhere between the stable and the door, that if she was going to be killed she would at least like to know why.
“Why did Your Highness let it go?”
He looked up. For a moment she thought she had misjudged him badly. Then he let the scroll curl shut over one finger, and seemed, if anything, pleased, as a man is pleased when a horse he has bought on a guess turns out to have a good mouth.
“Do you know the story of Wu Taibo?”
Every child who learned to read in Sanggyeong knew Wu Taibo. He was the eldest son of an old king, long before the first emperor, who saw that his father loved a younger brother best, and went away south of his own accord to live among barbarians, so that the kingdom could pass to the younger son without a quarrel. Confucius himself had praised him for it. And everyone in Dongdan knew why the prince liked the story. Two winters ago, at the great assembly after the old emperor’s death, the chiefs had been told to go and take the bridle of the son they wanted for their emperor. They had run for the younger brother’s horse like boys at a race. The younger brother, Deguang, was the Emperor now.
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“The histories praise him for leaving,” said the prince. “What came after, they give a single sentence. The barbarians made him their king. Then they stop. Not one word on what he did with it, all those years.” He unrolled it again. “I find I want very much to know.”
It was not an answer. She suspected it was the only one she was going to get.
“Yuzhi reads everything that leaves this house,” he went on. “From today, you will read me everything that comes into it. Letters, petitions, reports, verse. Here, aloud, while I paint, before Yuzhi has seen any of it. You will tell me what each one says, and what it does not.” He let out a little more of the scroll. “You have demonstrated that you know the difference. And I have always painted better with someone reading to me. My last reader had a cold and sniffed through the Book of Songs. I sent him back to the archive.”
He did not ask how old she was. He seemed to think it irrelevant. He read for a moment in silence, and she stood between the horses and waited, because she had no idea what else to do.
“Did you know that the emperor in Luoyang cannot read?” he said, without looking up. “Not one character. He was a cavalry officer for thirty years. His chief minister reads every report aloud to him, which means it is the chief minister who decides what the empire tells its emperor.” He rolled the scroll up. “I should prefer to choose my own reader.”
“Your Highness wants a captive to read your letters.”
She had not meant to say the word aloud. It was out before she could catch it, tiger and all.
“I want a reader to read my letters,” said the prince. “Captive is my mother’s word.”
His mother. The woman with one hand.
Ryeon bowed, because a bow committed her to nothing. As she straightened, her eyes went past him to the table at his elbow, where a letter lay open beside its slit envelope. Across the fold of the envelope, stamped in vermilion, was a seal she had only ever seen in the colophons of books: the seal of an emperor of the South.
“Ah,” said the prince, who had watched her see it. “Begin with that. I have read it. Tell me what I missed.”
It was a short letter, written by a clerk who had been told to be careful, for an emperor who would have it read to him.
The Emperor of the Great Tang, from his capital at Luoyang, inquired after the health of the King of Dongdan. He had heard that the northern winters were hard on the King. He recalled the long friendship between their houses, and the honour in which the Tang had always held the King’s late father. And he observed, in passing, that the sea between Dongdan and the Tang port of Dengzhou was in the autumn months unusually calm.
The Great Tang. The Tang of the poems she copied had ended before she was born. This one was a different Tang: a Shatuo house, Turks from the western steppe, who had picked up the old dynasty’s name after it fell, as you might pick up a dead man’s sword; the Khitan had done the same with Balhae and called it Dongdan. Ryeon wondered whether the clerk who wrote Great Tang at the head of the page had felt anything as he wrote it, and decided he had probably felt cold, since everybody was cold.
She read it aloud once, straight through. Then she read it again, and this time she stopped after unusually calm and let the silence do the clerk’s work.
“It doesn’t say come,” she said. “It says that if Your Highness were to come, it wouldn’t be the weather’s fault.”
“Indeed. That much I had gathered.” He sounded faintly disappointed, as her father used to sound when she gave him the answer from the commentary instead of her own. “So, I imagine, has everyone else who has held it.”
She looked at the letter again, not at the words this time but at the paper. It was fine southern paper, smooth and pale, folded in eight for the journey and pressed flat again. She ran her thumb down the margin, as she checked any sheet before she wrote on it.
There was a slickness under her thumb that should not have been there.
She climbed onto the stool he had not offered her and tilted the letter toward the white windows. Along every stroke of every character lay a sheen so faint she would never have seen it if her thumb had not told her where to look, as if the writing had been lightly varnished. In two places near the edge the paper had a clear spot, faintly yellow, the size of a grain of millet.
She had made that sheen herself, a hundred times, in this house.
“Your Highness,” she said, “somebody’s traced this.”
He went still. “Go on.”
“There’s wax on it. When I copy Your Highness’s calligraphy models in the scribes’ room, I lay the waxed paper over the top and trace the strokes, and if the brazier’s too close the wax goes soft and comes off on the…” She stopped, because she had just admitted that she let the brazier get too close to his calligraphy models.
“And comes off on the original.” He was on his feet. He took the letter out of her hands and turned it to the window, and she watched him see it: the sheen, the clear spots, and then all at once what they meant. “Of course. Yellow waxed paper, every stroke traced. That is how copies of the old masters are made. I have bought three such copies myself, and been very proud of them.” He laughed, a short sound with nothing amused in it. “An exact copy of a Tang emperor’s letter to me, in the clerk’s own hand, every stroke. It won’t have the seal, naturally. But a man who already wants to believe something does not ask to see the seal.”
He laid the letter down on the table, gently.
“My brother will have it in a month. He will not ask whether I meant to go.”
Ryeon kept quiet.
“It came to me sealed,” he said.
She picked up the envelope and turned the flap to the light. The vermilion seal sat squarely across the fold, unbroken until the prince had slit it. But under the seal, just inside the line of paste that held the flap down, ran a second line, a shade darker than the first.
“It’s been pasted twice,” she said. “Somebody steamed it open and closed it again.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, Your Highness. Somebody who had it for a night before you did. Somebody with a kettle, and steady hands, and a warm room.”
She stopped there. There were not many warm rooms in the house. She thought, without wanting to, of Lady Gao’s heated floors, and the letters stacked under the lotus tile. She put the thought away, and did not like how quickly it had come.
The prince looked at her a moment longer. Then he turned back to the window with the letter, and said nothing else, and after a while she understood that she had been dismissed.
The young lord was in the stable yard when she came out.
He was sitting on the edge of the water trough with his bow across his knees, pretending to restring it, and he had plainly been pretending for some time, because the string was already on. He watched her come out of the painting hall. He watched the steward slide the bar back across the door behind her. Then he looked at her as if she had come out of the sky.
“You were in there.”
“I was sent for.”
“Nobody gets sent for. I’ve asked.” He jumped down off the trough. “I asked every year since I was six. He says it’s not a place for boys who can’t sit still. What’s in there?”
“Horses.”
“Real ones?”
“Painted.”
He considered this, and seemed to find it worse. “Hundreds?”
She counted the tables in her head. “Forty-one. And one man on a horse, shooting backwards.”
“At what?”
“Nothing yet. He hasn’t decided.”
Ruan looked at the barred door with the face of someone doing a sum and not liking the total. Then he turned the look on her.
“He liked my exercise,” he said. “The one you did. He looked at it for ages. He said my yellow was better than last time. He said I was starting to see the shape of it.”
The prince had read her riddle off the heads of three columns by touching them.
So he had seen. And praised it anyway, with his son standing in front of him, waiting.
“That’s good,” she said.
“It’s your good.” He said it without any heat at all. “You’re in there because you’re good at it. And I’m out here because I’m not.” He shouldered the bow. “My mother says you Balhae women in this house are all spies.”
“I’m ten.”
“She says that’s how you get them young.” He hesitated, and became interested in his bowstring again. “Will you do tomorrow’s? It’s the same ten again. My tutor says my cold is a disgrace.”
She pictured the prince, looking at the sheet for ages.
“No,” she said.
He stared at her. Nobody, she suspected, had said no to him in a long time, apart from his father, and his father had not said it to his face.
“I’ll show you how,” she said, “if you want. It’s quicker than you think. Cold is just a house with ice under it.” She held up a finger before he could speak. “But you have to write it yourself. Otherwise he’ll know.”
“He didn’t know this time.”
“He knew,” said Ryeon.
Ruan opened his mouth, and shut it, and looked at the painting hall door again for so long that a groom came to take the horse he was standing in front of, and had to ask him twice to move.
Yuzhi was in the colonnade.
He was not, of course, waiting for her. He was standing at the corner of the court in his dark accounting coat, reading a tally board, and he happened to finish with it as she passed, and happened to fall into step beside her. He walked slowly, so as not to leave her behind. She had never been sure whether that was courtesy or a way of keeping her where he could see her. He did not greet her. He never had.
“The prince’s new reader,” he said after a while. “I had it from the steward.”
She said nothing.
“You’ll find the work mostly dull. Grain returns. Horse levies. Petitions from men who want their brother’s land. Now and then a letter arrives from the South under a vermilion seal, and the prince reads it alone in his painting hall, where there are no scribes.” He glanced at her sideways, once. “Now there is one.”
They had reached the place where the colonnade divided, one way to the library, one way to his office and the archive. He stopped there and shifted the tally board under his arm, and she saw at the edge of his right cuff a small dry fleck of something yellow.
“The Emperor’s officers come at the New Year,” he said, “to take an inventory of the prince’s property. They will work from my lists. I keep very good lists, Lady Bae. Horses, by colour and age. Books, by title and chest. Scribes, by name.” He let that rest a moment. “Yours, I think, they will recognise.”
He stayed at the fork with the board under his arm, as if it were her turn.
It was. She went to the library and did not look back.
Lady Bae.
No one in that house had called her by her family name since Sanggyeong. She was the little scribe, or the Balhae child, or you. The name was in his household register, in her own copying: Bae. Of Sanggyeong. Daughter. Daughter of a clerk, for all the register said, or of a groom. Halfway down the colonnade she understood that he had known whose daughter she was when he stood at his window with her poem for her father’s embassy, and looked at the fourth line, and said good.
And the yellow at his cuff. She told herself that half the clerks in Dongdan used yellow waxed paper, which was true, and that a fleck on a cuff proved nothing, which was also true, and that she had not just walked the length of a colonnade beside the man who had traced the prince’s letter for the Emperor.
That last one got her as far as the library door.
Lady Gao came to the library at dusk.
She came alone. She sat down on the second stool, the one nobody used, and looked round at the shelves as if she had known a room like this one in some other city.
“He has made you his reader,” she said, in Balhae.
“Yes.”
“Good. That is the right side of the door.” The library was never allowed a fire, because of the books, and her breath showed faintly in the cold. “I am going to tell you something. After that I will not tell you anything again for a long time. It isn’t safe for either of us.”
Ryeon waited.
“The winter his brother was made emperor,” said Lady Gao, “he rode south with a few hundred men. He calls it a hunt. The frontier guards did not. His brother has had him watched ever since.” Her hands lay quite still in her lap. “He doesn’t sleep in the same room two nights running. There is a ship at the mouth of the Liao, provisioned, that has never once been used. And his best books have been packed in chests since that winter. You walk past them every day.”
Ryeon thought of the twelve lacquered chests in the storeroom behind the library, roped and sealed with paper strips stamped in vermilion with the prince’s own seal. They had come south from Sanggyeong unopened. She had decided long ago that they held old accounts, because the seals made it a crime to find out otherwise, and she had a rule about crimes she could not get away with.
“When he goes again, he will go fast, and by sea,” said Lady Gao. “No herds. No grooms. No scribes, no maids. Only the things he has decided are books.”
She stood and went to the door. As she lifted her hand to it her sleeve fell back from her wrist, and Ryeon saw on the inside of her forearm a row of small healed cuts, pale and evenly spaced, like stitches in a hem.
Lady Gao saw her see them, and let the sleeve fall.
Ryeon did not ask. She added the question to her list without deciding to.
With her hand on the door, Lady Gao turned back.
“Make sure you are a book.”
“And Hulan?” said Ryeon.
Lady Gao looked at her as if Ryeon had spoken in a language she had once known and had since put away. Then she went out without answering.
Ryeon sat in the dark for some time after she had gone.
The chests were sealed, and to break one of the prince’s seals was a beating at the least; she had no wish to learn what came after the least. But nobody packed twelve chests without writing down what went into them. The household registers were kept in a cabinet at the far end of the painting hall. And that morning the prince had told her that everything in the house that came to be read was hers.
He had said nothing about the middle of the night. She decided he had not needed to.
She took the lamp and went out across the inner court. The stable was quiet, apart from the sound of horses being large in the dark. The cold had a smell of snow in it. At the painting hall the bar was across the door, where it always was.
She set the lamp down on the step. That morning the steward had slid the bar across with one hand. It took both her arms and a knee to heave one end up out of its bracket, and she held it there on her knee for three breaths before she worked the other end loose and stood the whole length of it against the wall. The knotted end had been on the left. She said so to herself twice, and picked up the lamp, and went in.
Inside, the paper windows held the last of the moonlight, and the horses lay grey on their tables in rows. The rider at the far end still had nothing to shoot at. She went past him to the cabinet, found the registers in a plain box labelled in the prince’s hand, and found the packing list at the bottom of the box, under everything else, which was where she would have put it.
The date at the top was the second year of Tianxian, the tenth month: a month before the chiefs took his brother’s bridle. He had packed before he lost.
The list ran chest by chest, in his careful, old-fashioned, beautiful hand. The History of the Former Han, one set. The Records of the Grand Historian, one set, with commentary. Brushes from Xuanzhou, twenty. Ink from Yizhou, ten cakes. Sutras. Maps. An herbal. The Wen Xuan, in a far better copy than hers. She read it as she read grain returns, line by line, expecting nothing, the lamp on the floor and the paper on her knees.
The twelfth chest had the shortest list. Calligraphy models, three. A box of seals. An inkstone from Duanzhou. And on the last line, in the same hand and the same ink, written two winters ago by a man who had never once spoken to her:
裴氏女 一
Daughter of the Bae house. One.
She read it three times. It did not change.
Then she went back to the beginning and read the whole list again, all twelve chests, slowly, looking this time for something else. She looked for 高, for Lady Gao. She looked for the character the clerks used for the prince’s Khitan wife. She looked for 阮, the young lord’s name, which had been on the corner of the exercise that had come through her window, and for the words young lord, and for son.
There were books, and brushes, and ink, and three calligraphy models, and a box of seals, and her.
She sat down on the floor of the painting hall with the lamp beside her, among his grey horses, and tried to work out what he had been reading two years ago, when he decided she was one of his books.