Chapter Three
The Horse Painter
Tango. Early summer, 930 (Bae Gu)
The court of Japan, having considered the envoy’s answers of the second month and his answers of the third, and finding the one to contradict the other, required of him a written statement of fault.
Masakazu brought the order himself, and paper with it, and a stick of good ink from the capital, which Bae Gu took to be an apology. They both knew the form. A taijō was what a provincial official wrote when his granary burned or his tax rice came in short: a plain account of the failure, a request for correction, a name at the end. It was not a punishment. It was the paper a punishment would later be written on.
“The court does not ask you to unsay anything,” Masakazu said. “Only to set down which of your answers you wish it to believe.”
“That is generous.”
“It is the Minister of the Right. He has a tidy mind, and two answers to one question offend it.” Masakazu looked out at the rain, which had not stopped. “Write the second one, my old friend. He has already decided it is the true one. He only wants it in your hand.”
Bae Gu ground the ink himself. It was a long time since he had needed to; there had been clerks for that for thirty years, and then for three years there had been nothing to write. The motion came back to his wrist as if it had been waiting.
He wrote that he had been sent by the Khitan king who now ruled the lands of Balhae, under the name of Dongdan. He wrote that in his first examination he had spoken of that king as his lord and of Dongdan as Balhae’s heir, as he had been instructed to speak, and that this had been false. He wrote that he had since spoken of the same king’s crimes, and that this was true, and that he understood an envoy who slanders the master who sent him has forfeited the protection of his office. He asked the court’s pardon for the disorder of his testimony, though not for its substance.
That much came easily. Thirty years of state letters had taught his hand to walk on its own through a confession.
Then he came to the line he had been dreading since Masakazu set down the paper. The court would want to know why. A man does not turn his testimony inside out in the third month for no reason, and the Minister of the Right would not care to be told that the reason was rain.
He thought about the poem in its lacquer box, under the letter of state.
He had read it a great many times by now. He had read the heads of the lines as pictures, as he had taught her, and found her name there; and then he had read the last line, and sat up half the night with it, because it was the line that told him what she wanted. Keep in your heart one inch of red. It was loyalty at its oldest: the heart an inch across, red all the way through. Every minister who had ever stood up in a burning court had carried one. A child of ten, writing from the conqueror’s own house, in the conqueror’s own poem, had reached back into the old books and handed him that phrase across the sea.
She was telling him not to kneel.
He had thought about who would pay for it if he stood. She would have thought of that first, he had told himself, and sent the line anyway; he had taught her never to hand a reader a line she had not weighed.
He had needed her to have weighed it. Otherwise he was a father with a living daughter in the king’s house, and the speech he had been making in his head for three years would have to remain in his head.
In the morning he had told Masakazu that there was no kingdom of Dongdan.
He could not write any of this. The poem had crossed the sea in the prince’s own hand. If the prince did not know what was in it, then she had done this under his nose, and the first word of it in a Japanese record would find its way back across the water to the man who owned her. If the prince did know, it was worse, and that was as far as he let the thought go.
So he wrote: As to the cause of this change, I can give none but that I am old, and it has rained a long time, and a man in a strange country comes to feel that he will not be asked again. Of my wife and my children I know nothing.
He wrote his name under it, and his titles, which no longer belonged to anything, and gave the sheet to Masakazu while the ink was still wet.
Masakazu read it through twice. He had always been a careful reader; it was why the court had sent him. Then he held the sheet a little toward the lamp.
“You wrote the last line more slowly than the rest,” he said.
“I am fifty-five. Some characters are heavier than others.”
Masakazu studied him for a moment longer, and folded the paper in three, and put it into his sleeve, and did not ask again.
Dongping. Early winter, 929 (six months earlier)
The prince painted in the mornings, and Ryeon read to him.
Being his reader was, mostly, the painting hall in the early morning, the hour of the dragon, with the white light coming through the paper windows and the brazier ticking, and the prince at his table with his sleeves tied back, and Ryeon on a stool at the end of it with a basket of whatever had come into the house since yesterday, reading it out loud. There were fewer sealed letters in it than she had hoped, and a great many more horses.
A horse levy from the Dragon Spring district, two pages, with sums. A complaint from a Khitan captain that his Balhae grooms stole oats. The prince listened to that one without lifting his brush from a horse’s flank.
“How many grooms?”
“Four, Your Highness.”
“Twenty strokes each,” said the prince, in the same pleasant voice he used for the weather, and laid a little more grey along the horse’s back. “Go on.”
Ryeon went on. She kept her eyes on the page, and her voice did not change, and when she came to the end of the next document she could not have said what was in it. Four grooms. She had probably passed them in the stable yard a hundred times. She did not know their names, and now she wanted to.
A poem from a minor official on the occasion of the first snow, which was dreadful, and which the prince made her read twice because he said its badness had a kind of grandeur.
Then a petition from the headman of a Balhae village in the north, one of the villages the Khitan had marched up onto the steppe after the fall. It was written by somebody who had learned his characters in a hurry and late in life, and it said that of the sixty households sent north with him, nineteen were left, and that they had eaten the seed grain before the first snow, and that if the king could send seed before the thaw they would sow it, and if he could not, there would be no one to sow it next year either. It ended with the headman’s name, and, under it, the finger-joint marks of the nineteen.
Ryeon read it in the same voice she had used for the horse levy. She had learned that if she changed her voice for the sad ones, she could not finish them.
The prince was painting a mare and foal standing in snow. He did not look up. He laid a wash of pale grey along the mare’s back, where the snow would be sitting, and waited for it to settle before he spoke.
“Give that to Yuzhi,” he said. “Tell him to send what is in the north granary. All of it. He will tell you there is not enough. Tell him I know.”
She put the petition on the pile for Yuzhi. The mare stood in her snow with her head down over the foal. It was a beautiful painting. Ryeon looked at it, and at the nineteen finger marks, and could not decide whether she was angry with him. It would keep. She put it on her list of things to decide later.
When the basket was empty he cleaned his brush and sat back and looked at the far end of the hall, where the rider still had nothing to shoot at.
“The Silla merchant who brought me the Emperor of the Tang’s letter,” he said, “is waiting in the town for a reply. He would like it before the ice closes the river mouth. I would like to give him one.” He turned the brush in his fingers. “Tell me what is wrong with that, reader.”
She had been thinking about it for nine days, so it came out all at once.
“Whatever Your Highness writes, the merchant carries. Whoever he showed the first letter to, he’ll show this one to. Then somebody traces it, and it goes north, and the Emperor reads Your Highness’s answer before the Tang does.” She stopped for breath. “And even when it gets to Luoyang, the Tang emperor can’t read it. His minister reads it to him.”
“Yes,” said the prince. “That is very nearly everything that is wrong with it. You have left out only my brother.” He laid the brush across the gap in the celadon mountains. “The first letter will reach him in a month. I am told the dispatch for the Emperor’s camp goes out the day after tomorrow, at first light. Yuzhi is very punctual.”
He said it lightly. He went back to his mare.
Ryeon thought about the woman with one hand, and the hundreds of officials she had sent into the grave after her husband, every one of them somebody’s scribe, or reader, or groom.
The day after tomorrow, at first light.
“I need Lord Yuzhi’s clerk out of the colonnade,” she told Hulan, that afternoon, in the kitchen yard. “For as long as it takes to boil an egg.”
Hulan was plucking a duck and kept at it. “Which egg?”
“What do you mean, which egg?”
“A hen’s egg or a goose egg? A goose egg takes twice as long.” Feathers drifted round her boots. “And soft or hard?”
“Hard. A goose.”
Hulan looked up at that, and for a moment her round face was entirely serious.
“Is it a bad thing?”
“It’s so that a bad thing doesn’t happen.”
“That’s what my brother said when he stole the captain’s horse, and he had it back in its stall before anybody missed it.” Hulan went back to the duck. “Lord Yuzhi goes to count the north granary in the middle of the afternoon, the hour of the monkey, every day, my aunt says you could set the water clock by him, and his clerk sits on the bench outside the door and eats pine nuts and spits the shells on the floor where Lord Yuzhi can’t see, and then somebody has to sweep them up.” She pulled a long feather free and examined it. “The geese are behind the woodshed. The peg’s gone out of the latch on their pen, it’s been gone since the autumn, I keep telling the steward. You only have to lean on it.”
“Hulan.”
“I’m not doing anything,” said Hulan. “I’m telling you about a latch.”
At the hour of the monkey the geese came round the corner of the colonnade in a single honking white wave, eleven of them, with their necks out flat and their wings half open. They went for the clerk’s pine nuts first. Then they went for the clerk. The clerk went over the bench backwards with a cry of genuine terror, and two grooms ran out of the stable to help and made it worse, and the steward came out of somewhere shouting in Khitan, and the largest gander turned on the steward with a look of personal recognition.
In the middle of it all Ruan came pelting out of the archery yard with his bow still in his hand and joy all over his face. Ryeon had never seen him look like that. She did not stay to watch.
Yuzhi’s door was not barred. He did not need to bar it; he had the clerk. She was inside before the gander had finished with the steward.
The office was as cold as it had been in autumn, and tidier, if that were possible. The pigeonholes ran from floor to ceiling, each with its little wooden tag in Khitan script. The floor had been swept, and the brushes on the desk lay in a row in order of size. In the middle of the desk stood the dispatch box for the Emperor’s camp: black lacquer, bound at the corners with iron, with a hasp and a heavy bronze lock.
The lock was hanging open on its hasp.
She stood looking at it for a breath. Yuzhi locked his ink. She had seen him do it. She had copied the inventory of his own office for him once, and it ran to four pages, and he had sent it back to her for a missing tally stick.
Then she saw his seal. It lay beside the box on a fold of silk, with the dish of vermilion and a strip of paper already cut to length, set out in a row as neatly as the brushes. He would count his millet, and walk back past his clerk, and seal the box with his own hand. Until then the lock was a man on a bench with a bag of pine nuts, and at present he was underneath a goose.
She had until somebody caught the gander.
She lifted the lid.
His report lay on top, in Khitan script, which she could not read: three short lines, to cover a letter from an emperor. Whatever Yuzhi was telling the camp, he was not telling it much. She lifted it out without letting it change shape and laid it on the desk. Under it, folded in eight, was a sheet of yellow waxed paper.
She opened it, and there it was. The Emperor of the Great Tang inquires after the health of the King of Dongdan. Every stroke of the clerk’s hand, traced over in black, on paper so thin she could see the grain of the desk through it. It was good work. She knew how good, because she knew how long it took.
There was no seal on it.
She knelt on Yuzhi’s floor with the tracing on her knee and took out her paper knife.
Waxed paper does not drink ink. The ink sits on top of the wax, like frost on a window, and if you are patient a bone knife will lift it off a stroke at a time and leave the paper behind. She had done it a hundred times to her own mistakes. She had never done it with a goose screaming outside the window, and her hand did not like it, and she made it do it anyway.
Two phrases to change, and one to leave alone.
He had heard that the northern winters were hard on the King. She lifted hard on the King off the wax, stroke by stroke, and in the clerk’s careful, frightened hand, which she had read aloud nine days ago and had been seeing behind her eyes ever since, she wrote kind to the King.
The honour in which the Tang had always held the King’s late father. She left that. It was true, and it was harmless, and it would sound warm to the Emperor, who was the same late father’s son.
The sea between Dongdan and the Tang port of Dengzhou was in the autumn months unusually calm. She took out unusually calm and wrote very wide.
That made it a different letter. Now the Emperor of the Great Tang hoped the King of Dongdan was well, and remembered his father fondly, and observed that the two countries were a long way apart, which they were. It was as dull as a grain return. She would not have read it twice.
The geese had moved off toward the stable. Somebody was laughing, high and helpless, and she thought it was Ruan.
She breathed on the wax to dull the shine where she had scraped it. She folded the tracing in eight along its old creases, and laid it back in the box, and laid Yuzhi’s report on top of it as it had been, with the edge a finger’s breadth from the corner. She closed the lid. She left the lock hanging open on its hasp, exactly as she had found it, because a lock that had been open when he left and was shut when he came back would tell him more than anything she had done inside.
She looked at his seal, lying ready on its silk. Before the lamps were lit he would press it down on top of her two phrases.
On the way to the door she saw the waste basket under the desk, and in it, on top, a tally tag split down the middle where somebody had made a mistake: a strip of pine with three lines on it in Yuzhi’s small, square, unhurried Chinese. North granary. Millet. Fourth bay.
She did not decide to take it. She found it was in her sleeve anyway.
She went out through the window, the second of his two, into the gap behind the woodshed, and dropped into the snow, and walked round to the kitchen yard and asked Hulan, in a perfectly ordinary voice, whether she needed any help with that duck.
That night she took the tally tag out of her sleeve and put it with the others.
She kept them in a box that had once held a cake of ink, under a loose board in the floor of the library, behind the eleventh shelf. It was not a large collection. A tally of lamp oil and candles in the steward’s hand, mostly numbers, all of them terrible. A torn corner of one of the prince’s book lists. Ruan’s own first exercise, the one with the five-legged horse. A note from Lady Gao about thread. Now Yuzhi’s North granary. Millet. Fourth bay.
She did not quite know why she kept them. She had begun the first winter, with the steward’s tally, because it had seemed important to know what each person’s hand looked like when they were not trying. People were careful when they wrote a letter. They were never careful when they wrote down millet.
She studied Yuzhi’s three lines by the lamp. Small, square, every stroke finished, like a man buttoning his coat all the way to the top. She traced the first character on the floor with a wet finger. It was much harder than it looked.
The next day she went outside.
She had to ask Lady Gao, and she had worked out three reasons in advance, all of them about brushes. She got as far as the first.
“Yes,” said Lady Gao, before she had finished. “Hulan is going to the Silla merchant’s for needles and floss and a packet of mine. Go with her.” She warmed her hands at the brazier. “Three years is too long to look at nothing further away than a shelf. It is bad for the eyes.”
So she went out of the gate.
She had imagined it so often that she had expected it to feel like something. It felt like walking. The guards on the gate looked at Hulan’s face and Lady Gao’s token and did not look at Ryeon at all, and the gate swung open, and there was the street.
It was full. She had forgotten that a city could be so full of people who belonged to no one she knew. Khitan riders in fur hats went by at a walk with their bows cased at their knees. Two Uighur traders were arguing over a camel, and the camel was ignoring them both. A Chinese clerk in a long gown picked his way through the frozen ruts, holding the gown up out of the mud. And everywhere, in doorways and under awnings and squatting by little fires at the edges of the street, there were people who looked like her.
The Balhae people the Khitan had brought down from Sanggyeong had been put in the lower town, by the river, in long sheds that had been barracks and before that had been stables. She had come south with the household the summer before last, but inside a covered cart with the scribes’ boxes, and she remembered the road mostly as the smell of wet felt. She had not understood how many there were. Most of them were talking Malgal, the speech of the river villages and the northern forests, which Ryeon had heard all her life from grooms and porters and never learned, because nobody in her mother’s house had thought she would need it. Her mother had called it the kitchen tongue once, and then been sorry. They were selling things. Dried mushrooms on mats. Wooden combs. A single good bowl, held up by an old man who did not call out what it was or what he wanted for it, as if he only half believed he was selling it.
Somewhere in the crowd, a woman called to a child to come here this minute, not in Malgal but in the speech of the capital, in the accent of the inner city.
It was not her mother’s voice. Ryeon knew that before she had finished turning round. It was only the accent, and the words, and the impatience, which were exactly her mother’s. She stood in the street with her heart going like the geese, and Hulan, who had walked on three paces, came back and took her hand without saying anything, and kept hold of it until they reached the merchant’s.
The Silla merchants lodged in a Balhae house by the river, a long building with heated floors that had belonged to someone important before the fall. Choe Ung had the room at the end. It was warm. That was the first thing Ryeon noticed when the door opened: the warmth coming up through her boots. The second was the kettle on the brazier, singing to itself.
The third was Choe Ung. For a man who had carried an emperor’s letter across the sea, he was very small: a dried-up man of perhaps fifty, with sea-cracked hands and a face like a walnut and a long brown coat hung with pouches. He was sitting cross-legged on the warm floor, eating a persimmon.
“The Lady Gao’s maid,” he said, in bad Khitan. Then he turned to Ryeon, and switched without the smallest pause into a language that made her ears ring. “And the prince’s reader.”
It was the speech of Silla. Its vowels were in the wrong places, and most of its words were strangers; but some of them were cousins, and she had not heard anything so close to her own tongue spoken to her by a stranger in three years. She caught perhaps one word in four. When he saw her lose the thread he slid, without seeming to notice, into the slow plain Chinese that merchants spoke on every quay from Dengzhou to Hakata, all nouns and numbers, and back again, so that a conversation with Choe Ung was like crossing a river on stepping stones.
“How do you know who I am?”
“I carry letters,” said Choe Ung, as though that were an answer. He held out his hand, and Hulan gave him Lady Gao’s packet. He weighed it in his palm, and put it into the fold of his coat, over his heart, and not on the pile of packets on the table behind him. Ryeon noticed that.
Hulan went off to the next room with a boy to choose needles. Ryeon stayed by the kettle. It was a good kettle, Silla bronze, with a long spout.
“You brought the prince the letter from the Tang,” she said.
“I bring the prince many things. Southern ink, forty cakes. Brushes, two hundred. Silla paper, ten bales. He says it is better than any paper in the Tang, and he is right, so I charge him Tang price and ten in the hundred on top.” He ate a piece of persimmon. “Sometimes a letter.”
“Somebody steamed it open.”
Choe Ung went on eating. “Did they.”
She looked at the kettle. It went on singing.
“Then they closed it again, very carefully, and it went to somebody else for a night before it went to the prince.” She heard her voice going quick and plain, as it had with Yuzhi, and this time she did not try to stop it. “Somebody with yellow waxed paper. And then it came to the prince with the seal on it, as if nobody had touched it.”
Choe Ung finished his persimmon, and wiped his fingers on a cloth, and looked at her with mild interest, as if she were weather coming in from an unexpected quarter.
“Little reader,” he said. “I carry for anybody who pays me. Each one, I tell him: only you. On the quay we say, a boat that talks sails empty. So you ask me straight out, and what do I tell you?”
“I’m not anybody,” said Ryeon. “I haven’t paid you.”
That made him laugh. It was a cracked, surprised laugh, a sound badly out of practice.
“No,” he agreed. “Not a coin.” He looked at the kettle, and then at her, and seemed to come to a decision about something. “The prince’s reply. One, or none? Twenty days, the river mouth freezes, and after that nothing goes out, not furs, not ginseng, not letters.”
“There’ll be one.”
“In writing?”
She thought about the tracing, folded in eight, waiting in the dispatch box to ride north with two of her phrases in it. And the man in Luoyang, who could not read, having his letters read to him.
“No,” she said. “Not in writing.”
Ruan found her on the way back across the inner court.
He came out of the archery yard as if he had been waiting just inside it, which he had, and fell into step beside her without a word. Hulan, after one look at his face, discovered that she was needed urgently in the kitchen.
“Where were you,” said Ruan, “when the geese got out?”
“In the library.”
“No, you weren’t.” He said it quietly. “I was chasing the big one round the woodshed. You came out of Lord Yuzhi’s window and fell in the snow.”
She stopped walking.
“I didn’t tell anybody,” he said. “I’m not going to. I just wanted you to know I saw.” He looked at the painting hall door, which was barred, and then back at her. “You go in there. You go in Lord Yuzhi’s office. You go out of the gate. The grooms told me. You’re a slave, and you go everywhere, and I’m not allowed in one room in my own father’s house.”
Nobody in the house said that word. They said the Balhae people, and the scribes, and the little scribe.
“I’m not a slave,” she said. “I’m a book.”
He stared at her. She had not meant to say it. It made no sense to him, she could see. She did not explain.
After a while he put his hand inside his coat and took out a folded sheet and pushed it at her.
“I did cold,” he said. “By myself. The house with the ice under it. My father hasn’t seen it yet.”
She unfolded it. It was the same ten lines of the Thousand Character Classic, five times each, and they were bad, but they were his. And in the fifth line, the character for cold, 寒, stood up straight on the page: a roof, the bundled straw under it, the two little strokes of ice at the bottom. He had got the ice in the right place. It looked cold.
“That’s good,” she said, and meant it.
“I know.” He took the sheet back and folded it into his coat. “I’m still cross with you.”
He walked off toward the stable. She watched him go.
She went to the painting hall at the hour of the dragon the next morning with the basket, as usual, and did not open it.
“Your Highness,” she said, “send him a picture.”
The prince was grinding ink. He went on grinding it.
“Explain.”
“The emperor in Luoyang can’t read. But he can look. He was a cavalry officer for thirty years, Your Highness said. If you send him a picture, nobody has to read it to him. He’ll know what it says himself.” She had worked this out in the night, lying on her matting, and it had seemed clever at the time, and it still did, a little. “And nobody can trace a painting and say it’s a letter. Lord Yuzhi can’t send the Emperor a picture of a horse and say, Here is the prince saying he’s leaving. There isn’t a sentence in it. There’s no characters to scrape.”
She heard the last word come out and clamped her mouth shut over it.
The prince stopped grinding.
He sat still with the ink stick upright in his fingers and an expression she could not read. Then he set down the ink stick, and stood, and walked the length of the hall to the last table, where the rider was still turned in his saddle with his bow drawn and nothing behind him but bare paper. She followed, because he seemed to expect it.
“He was a cavalry officer for thirty years,” the prince said, half to himself. “He would understand a horse.” He touched the empty paper behind the rider. “And so the question I have been avoiding since summer can no longer be avoided. What is following him?”
He turned to her.
“You have an opinion. You have had one since the day you stopped in front of him. I watched you.”
It was true. She had not known it showed.
“A tiger,” she said.
“Why a tiger?”
She thought about saying something sensible, about hunting, or about tigers being worthier game for a prince than deer. Then she remembered Ruan saying slave, and decided that she was tired of saying sensible things to people who could see through them.
“Because that’s what sits on top of a captive,” she said. “In the character. A tiger, with a man underneath. So if he’s turned round and he’s shooting at it, he isn’t one any more.”
The prince was silent for long enough that she began to count the steps to the door.
Then he laughed, not the short laugh from the day of the Tang letter but a real one, surprised out of him.
“Captive,” he said. “With the tiger on its head.” He picked up a brush. “Sit down, reader. This will take some time. Read me something long. Read me the Fu on the Western Capital, it has nearly as many animals in it as a hunt.”
So she sat on her stool at the end of the long table and read him Zhang Heng’s Fu on the Western Capital, all of it, the palaces and the parks and the great imperial hunt, while the prince painted a tiger.
He did it fast, once he began. He had been thinking about it, she realised, for longer than he had admitted: the tiger came out of the bare paper behind the rider in a few long strokes of grey, low and stretched in mid-leap, its tail straight out behind it and its head down, so close behind the horse that it had to be there already. The rider’s arrow pointed at its face. You could not tell who would reach whom first. Somewhere in the great hunt her voice stopped, and she had to go back three lines to find her place. Nothing on the paper was black except the eye.
When he had finished he stood back and looked at it with his head on one side.
“He’ll know,” he said. “A cavalry officer will know a man running from something that will kill him. And a man who still means to turn and fight it.” He wiped the brush. “My brother would know too, if he saw it. That is why he will not see it. Yuzhi will look at it and see a hunting picture, because that is what Yuzhi looks for. Everyone reads what they expect to read, reader. Go on with Zhang Heng.”
He let it dry while she read the last part of the fu. Then he rolled it in silk, and put it in a bamboo tube, and sealed the tube with his own seal, and gave it to the steward, who gave it to a boy, who ran with it through the snow to the house by the river, where a small man with a walnut face was waiting for it beside a warm floor and a kettle.
Ryeon watched the boy go out of the gate from the third window, standing on the stool. The tube bounced on his back as he ran. She thought about the tracing going north, and the tiger going south, and her father somewhere out to the east, and whether he had read her poem yet, and what he had seen in it, and whether it was the same thing she had meant.
She thought that he must have. He had taught her. Of everyone in the world, he was the one reader who would not read what he expected.