Chapter Four
The Hand
Dongping. New Year, 930
Hulan’s aunt was right.
They came on the fourth day of the New Year, out of the north, in a long black line across the snow: twenty riders, a train of camels, two covered carts, and a banner Ryeon had never seen before, a white gyrfalcon on blue. The banner meant the Emperor. The second cart, the one with felt curtains and a brazier smoking through a hole in its roof, meant the Empress Dowager: the old empress, the prince’s mother, the woman with one hand.
“That’s her,” said Hulan, at the library’s east window. She had come up the steps two at a time to fetch Ryeon and had not bothered to knock with anything. “The one from the old empress, Lady Talan, my aunt says she’s a Shulü, from the old empress’s own clan, and she was at the funeral, right up close, and she saw.”
“Saw what?”
Hulan gave her a look of pure pity. “The hand.”
The woman who climbed down from the second cart was old and small and so wrapped in sable that she seemed to have no body at all, only a quantity of fur with a face at the top of it. A groom held out his arm, and she put her left hand on it, and Ryeon saw that she wore one bracelet, heavy gold, on her left wrist. Her right wrist was bare.
“All the old empress’s women do that now,” Hulan whispered. “Since the funeral. One bracelet. On the side she’s got left.”
“Why?”
“So that nobody forgets,” said Hulan. She had stopped whispering, and looked, for a moment, much older than fifteen. “That’s what my aunt says. So nobody in the whole empire ever forgets she did it.”
They counted everything.
Ryeon had known they would. Yuzhi had told her. But she had imagined it as something that happened to account books, quietly, in a room with a brazier. She had not imagined the Emperor’s officers walking the whole house from end to end with Yuzhi’s lists in their hands and a clerk behind each one with a tally board, touching things.
They began with the horses, because they were Khitan. For two whole days the stable yard was full of officers in fur hats, and grooms leading out the prince’s horses one at a time, and Yuzhi standing in the cold reading from his list in his flat, unhurried voice: Bay stallion, seven years, white off hind. Grey mare, four years, blind left eye. Dun gelding, twelve years, the prince’s own. An officer checked each horse’s teeth and each horse’s feet and made a mark, and the clerk made a mark, and the horse went back in, and the next one came out. There were two hundred and twelve horses. Ryeon knew because she counted the marks from the window, since nobody had told her not to.
On the third day of counting they did the household.
They lined everyone up in the inner court, on the swept snow, by kind. Grooms with grooms. Cooks with cooks. The prince’s guard in a long row by the gate with their bows. The women of the inner quarters stood under the colonnade, out of the wind: Lady Xiao, the prince’s Khitan wife, straight-backed, in a coat of white fox with a collar that came up to her ears; Lady Gao a little behind her and to one side, in grey, with her hands in her sleeves. Hulan stood behind Lady Gao with the other maids and tried to look at everything at once.
The scribes stood at the end of the line, by the library door. There were nine of them. Ryeon was the ninth, and the smallest by a head.
Yuzhi read. An officer counted. A clerk wrote.
When he reached the scribes, Yuzhi read their names, and their places of origin, and their duties, and each scribe bowed as his name was read. Ryeon listened to the names going down the line toward her like footsteps. Wang, of Youzhou, archive copyist. Yi, of Sanggyeong, secretariat clerk, second grade. She knew what was coming. She knew what he had written beside her name, because she had copied his household register fair her first winter in this city, and come to her own entry in the middle of a sheet, and copied that too, in the library hand, without letting the brush slow down.
“Bae,” said Yuzhi. “Of Sanggyeong. Daughter. Library. One.”
The officer was a big, cheerful-looking Khitan with frost in his moustache, and he looked at her for slightly longer than at the others, and she saw him wonder why a library needed a child. Then he made his mark, and the clerk made his, and she was counted.
They counted the family last. Lady Xiao, one. Lady Gao, one. And then, because the officers worked from Yuzhi’s list, and Yuzhi’s list was thorough, they came to the prince’s son, who had been made to stand at his mother’s side in a new coat, with his hair freshly shaved and his face set like a door.
“The prince’s eldest son,” Yuzhi read. “Ruan. Ten years. One.”
The officer made his mark.
“I’m not a horse,” said Ruan, quite loudly, in Khitan.
There was a short, appalling silence. Lady Xiao did not move her head at all, but something happened to the line of her shoulders, and Ruan went red to the tips of his ears. The cheerful officer looked as if he would dearly have liked to laugh, and did not dare. Yuzhi kept his eyes on his list. He read the next name, which was the prince’s youngest daughter by a concubine, aged two, who was asleep in a nurse’s arms and did not object to being counted.
Ryeon, at the far end of the court, found that she had pressed her lips together so hard they hurt. She was not sure whether it was to keep from laughing, or from something else.
That night she lay on her matting in the library and did the sums.
Horses: two days. The household: one. Tomorrow, Yuzhi had told the steward, they would do the storerooms. And the day after that, the officers had told everybody at dinner, loudly and many times, they would do the painting hall, because the Empress Dowager’s envoy loved horses and wished to see the prince’s famous paintings with her own eyes before she went home.
The painting hall had a cabinet. The cabinet had a box. The box had a list.
She had read it so often in her head since autumn that she no longer needed to see it. The date at the top: the tenth month of the second year of Tianxian. A month before the chiefs took his brother’s bridle. And then twelve chests, set out as a man sets out the things he is taking on a journey, with the best things first. They were still packed. They were still roped and sealed in the storeroom behind the library, exactly as the list said, and tomorrow the officers would count them.
She did not understand all of it. But she had once heard Lady Gao say a thing over the brazier, to nobody, that she had not understood then either: A man who runs the night he loses is a brother in a temper. A man who packed before he lost is still leaving. She thought she understood the second half now.
And at the bottom of the twelfth chest, in his own hand, Daughter of the Bae house. One.
She thought about what happened to a brother who was still leaving. She thought about what happened to the things on his list. She thought about Lady Talan’s bare right wrist.
She got up, and went to find Ruan.
He was in the stable, where he slept half the time when his tutor was not looking, curled in the straw in the stall of a small shaggy dun pony who was the one living thing in the house he seemed to like without reservation. He was not asleep. He was lying on his back looking at the rafters.
“Go away,” he said, without turning his head.
“I need you to let a horse out.”
That made him turn his head.
“In the middle of the inner court,” said Ryeon. “In an hour. A big one, that runs. Not him.” She nodded at the dun pony, who was asleep on his feet with his lower lip hanging. “Something everybody has to chase. The guard on the painting hall too.”
Ruan sat up slowly, with straw in his hair.
“There’s a seal on the painting hall door,” he said. “The officers put it on. A paper one, with the Emperor’s mark. If anybody breaks it, they get flogged. Even me.”
“I’m not going to break it.”
“Then how…”
“There’s a window on the south side,” said Ryeon, “where the frame lifts out. They take them all out in summer, to let the air in. The fourth one from the end is loose in its groove. I can get up to it if somebody gives me a leg.”
He stared at her.
“You’ve been counting the windows in my father’s painting hall.”
“I count the windows everywhere.”
“Why?”
She looked for an answer, and found none she could give to someone who had never been carried anywhere on a cart.
“In case,” she said.
Ruan looked at her, and then at the pony.
“I’m still cross with you,” he said.
“You can be cross. You have to let a horse out.” She hesitated, and then gave him the thing she had come to give him, which she had been holding back in case she could get what she wanted without it. “And then you can come in.”
He went quite still.
“Into the painting hall.”
“While I get what I need. You can look at everything. It’s dark, but there’s the moon on the paper. You’ll be able to see.” She swallowed. “You’ve asked every year since you were six. You said.”
Ruan got up out of the straw. He brushed himself off, which made no difference to the straw at all.
“The big chestnut,” he said. “The one the officer liked. He hates being shut in at night, and he kicks, and it takes six men to catch him. I’ll do it at the second drum. What are you getting?”
“Something of mine,” said Ryeon.
At the second drum, when the gate tower had beaten the night’s second watch and the house had been dark an hour, the big chestnut came out of the stable like a fire going up a curtain, and took the stable door half off its hinges on the way, and went three times round the inner court at a flat gallop with his tail straight up and his heels flashing, while the grooms ran out shouting and the officers’ men ran out shouting and the guard on the painting hall, after one look back at the door with its paper seal, ran out shouting too. Somebody brought a torch. The chestnut went straight through the place where the torch was. It was, Ryeon thought, a very good horse.
Ruan arrived behind the painting hall out of breath and grinning, with a rope burn across one palm.
“He bit the steward,” he said. “Did you see? He bit him.”
“Give me a leg.”
He laced his fingers and she stepped into them, and he boosted her, staggering, and she got her hands on the sill of the fourth window from the end and worked her fingers into the gap at the edge of the frame. It was stiff with cold. She pulled, and it held, and she pulled again, and it came up out of its groove with a dry wooden squeak that she felt in her teeth, and she lifted it in and down and set it carefully against the wall inside.
Then she climbed through, and reached back, and hauled Ruan up after her, and they both fell into the painting hall together and lay on the floor in the dark, breathing.
It was very cold, and very quiet, and smelled of ink. The moonlight came in through the paper of the other windows, white and even, the same light as the day but colder, and in it the tables ran away down the hall in rows, and on every table lay the horses.
Ryeon got up and went to the cabinet. She knew where everything was. She opened the door of the cabinet and lifted out the plain box labelled in the prince’s hand, and felt down through the registers to the bottom, where the list was, under everything else, where she had put it back in autumn.
It was there.
She took it out and held it a moment, and then folded it small and put it inside her coat, against her skin, where she could feel the edge of it when she breathed. She put the other registers back in their order. She closed the box. She closed the cabinet. Then she turned round to tell Ruan to hurry.
He had not moved from the place where he had fallen. He was standing in the middle of the hall, among the tables, with his arms hanging at his sides, looking.
She had seen the horses so many times now, in the mornings, while she read, that she had stopped seeing them. She tried to look at them the way he was. Forty-one horses, galloping and standing and grazing and crossing rivers, grey in the moonlight, every one of them alive. She watched him go slowly from table to table. He did not touch anything. At the bay stallion with the white off hind he said, under his breath, That’s Thunder, and at the grey mare with her head turned away he said, That’s the blind one, that’s her, he’s done her blind side, and his voice cracked a little in the middle.
Then he came to a small painting she had never noticed, on the last table but one, half under a book. It was a pony. A small, shaggy dun pony, standing four-square, with its lower lip hanging and its eyes half shut, so exactly itself that Ryeon nearly laughed. On its back sat a boy in a Khitan coat, with his hair shaved at the crown and two long locks at his temples, holding the reins very correctly in both fists.
The boy had no face. The prince had painted the coat, and the hair, and the hands on the reins. Where the face should have been, there was only the paper.
Ruan stood and looked at it.
“That’s Dusk,” he said finally. “That’s my pony.”
Ryeon said nothing.
“That’s me,” said Ruan.
He did not ask why there was no face. He only stood there, and after a while Ryeon understood that he was not going to move until she made him, and that she did not want to be the one who did.
Out in the court the chestnut screamed, and men shouted, and the shouting began to come closer.
“Ruan,” she said. “We have to go.”
He went. He kept his back to the painting. She lowered him out of the window first, and passed the frame down to him. Then she climbed out herself, and he caught her round the waist when she dropped. Then they lifted the window frame back into its groove together, Ruan pushing from below, and it went home with the same dry squeak. The paper seal on the door had never been touched.
He did not ask her again what she had taken. She was grateful.
The next day the officers did the storerooms, and the day after that they came to do the painting hall, and Yuzhi turned them away.
She saw it from the colonnade, with her basket. She had made sure she was there. The cheerful officer came across the inner court toward the painting hall with three clerks and the paper seal already half peeled off the door in his mind; she could see it in his walk. Yuzhi stepped out of his office and met him in the middle of the snow, and stopped him with a tally board.
She could not hear what he said. She saw him point at the board. She saw him point at the storeroom, where the twelve chests had been counted the day before, roped and sealed, and entered in the officers’ books as books, the prince’s, stored since the removal from Sanggyeong. She saw him point, last and longest, at the north, toward the steppe, and the Emperor, and something the officer seemed not to want to think about. The officer looked at the painting hall door, and then at Yuzhi. He shrugged, enormously, as Khitan men did, with the whole of his coat. Then he turned round and took his clerks back across the court to count the kitchen’s iron pots.
The paper seal stayed on the painting hall door, untouched. Nobody opened the cabinet. Nobody looked in the box.
Ryeon stood in the colonnade with her basket and the list against her skin, and worked it out.
Yuzhi was the Emperor’s eyes. If the officers found a list two years old, somebody would ask where the Emperor’s eyes had been all that time. So he had turned them away to save himself.
It made sense.
The envoy sent for the prince’s verse on the last day.
She did it at a banquet. The officers had finished counting, and the prince gave a feast to send them home, in the great hall with the hangings down and four braziers going and a whole sheep turning outside the door. Ryeon was not invited to the feast. She was fetched to it halfway through by the steward, who said only, “You. Hall. The old lady wants you,” in his slow loud Chinese, and walked so fast across the court that she had to run to keep up.
The great hall was hot and loud and smelled of mutton fat and kumis. The officers were at the long tables, drinking. The prince sat at the high table with Lady Xiao on his right, white fox to her ears, and on his left, in the place of honour, Lady Talan of the Shulü, in her sables, with her one bracelet. Yuzhi sat further down, not drinking. Lady Gao was not there at all.
The prince’s book of verse lay unrolled on the table in front of Lady Talan. It was his own collection, the poems he had written in Chinese since he was a boy, copied fair in his own hand. Ryeon knew it well. She had made the index.
“The child,” said Lady Talan, in Khitan. Her voice was much bigger than her body. “Is that the reader?”
“That is my reader,” said the prince.
“Good.” Lady Talan put out her left hand, the one with the bracelet, and laid it flat on the poems. “The Empress Dowager does not read Chinese. Neither do I. But she would like to know what her son is thinking about these long northern winters, and she has heard that he writes it all down in Chinese, where his mother cannot get at it.” Down the table the officers laughed, a little too loudly. Lady Talan did not. “So you will read me some, child. In Khitan. Whatever I put my finger on.”
“My lady,” said the prince pleasantly, “I would be glad to read them to you myself.”
“No doubt,” said Lady Talan. “But I would like the child to do it.” She turned small, black, interested eyes on Ryeon. “Children don’t know enough to lie.”
Ryeon came round the end of the table and stood beside her, so close that she could smell the sables, and a sweet heavy scent under them that she thought was camphor. Lady Talan moved her finger along the columns without looking at them, and stopped.
Ryeon looked down.
It was a quatrain. She knew it. She had indexed it under Birds.
霜落遼東野
孤鴻夜夜飛
不知天外事
一意向南歸
Frost falls on the fields east of the Liao.
A lone wild goose flies, night after night.
It knows nothing of the world beyond the sky;
its one thought is to go home, south.
She saw it the moment she looked.
Go home, south. In Chinese it was nothing. Every poet since the Han had sent wild geese home to the south. The Emperor Wu’s Autumn Wind did it, in the Wen Xuan she copied every day, the grass and trees turn yellow and fall, the wild geese go home south, and nobody had looked at the words in a thousand years.
But Lady Talan would not hear it in Chinese. She would hear it in Khitan, from Ryeon’s mouth, and Ryeon would have to choose a Khitan word for 歸. The character had a little broom tucked into its right side; in the oldest songs it was a bride going to her husband’s house for good, and ever since it had meant going back to the place where you belong. The Khitan for that was the word for where you were born. And everyone on the steppe knew where geese were born, even children, even the cooks. Geese went south for the winter because the cold sent them. They went home to the north, in spring, to the lakes. A goose whose one thought was to go home, south, said in Khitan, was not a goose at all. It was a man who thought his home was in the Tang.
Lady Talan had been born on the steppe. She would hear it in the first breath.
The prince was watching her. He did not look worried. He looked the way he had in the painting hall, when she said tiger: interested.
Ryeon read the poem aloud in Khitan.
Frost falls on the fields east of the Liao. A lone wild goose flies, night after night. It knows nothing of the world beyond the sky. Its one thought is to fly south, out of the cold.
She said it in her plainest voice, the voice for horse levies. Fly south. There was nothing in it at all.
Lady Talan listened with her eyes half closed. When Ryeon stopped, she opened them.
“Again,” she said.
Ryeon read it again. Fly south, out of the cold. Exactly the same. Her voice did not move.
Lady Talan considered her. Then she took her hand off the book.
“The Empress Dowager says that geese are stupid birds,” she said, to the prince, not to Ryeon. “She says they fly wherever the cold sends them, and half of them are eaten on the way.” She lifted her cup. “Your health, King of Dongdan. Your child reads very nicely.”
The prince inclined his head. He did not look at Ryeon at all. He had not looked at her once since she began to read the second time.
Yuzhi, further down the table, was looking at her. He was not drinking. He looked for three breaths, and then went back to not drinking.
The steward took her back across the court. She walked in the snow in front of him with her face perfectly still. She went into the library and shut the door and put the bar across it, which she had never done before, and stood in the dark with her back against it.
Then she put her hands over her mouth, and laughed until she had to sit down.
She knew she should be frightened, and she was. It made no difference. She had never in her life felt anything as good.
Much later, when she had stopped, she lit the lamp and took the list out from inside her coat.
It was warm from her skin, and creased where she had folded it. She smoothed it flat on the matting.
Daughter of the Bae house. One.
She should burn it. She knew that, the same way she had known she should burn the blotted poem. It was enough to hang a prince, and she was on it.
She sat looking at the last line until the lamp wanted trimming.
Nobody had written anything down about her in three years, except to count her. But somebody had once sat down in a cold month, and written down the few things in the world he could not bear to leave behind. And then, at the end, he had written her.
She folded it small again, and took up the loose board behind the eleventh shelf, and put it in the ink-cake box with the steward’s tally and the prince’s book list and Ruan’s five-legged horse and Yuzhi’s millet. Then she put the board back, and blew out the lamp, and went to sleep with her hand flat on the floor above it.