Chapter Five
Heavenly Emperor, Human King
Tango. Summer, 930 (Bae Gu)
The verdict came down from the capital on a fine day, which Bae Gu thought showed a want of tact on the part of the weather.
Masakazu read it to him on the veranda of the guesthouse, in the full formal voice, because it was a document of the Council of State and had to be read in the voice it was written in. The court of Japan had considered the embassy from the land formerly called Balhae. It found that the envoy had given contrary accounts of his own king; that he had in his later testimony spoken much of that king’s crimes; and that an envoy who reviles the lord who sent him cannot be received as that lord’s mouth, nor his letter as that lord’s letter. The embassy would not proceed to the capital. The envoy and his company would be provisioned for the voyage and sent home from Tango when the winds allowed. The court’s reply to the King of Dongdan, setting out these findings, would be delivered into the envoy’s hands under seal.
Masakazu lowered the document.
“I wrote the findings myself,” he said. “As plainly as I could. I thought that was the last kindness I had to give you: that nobody in your country should be able to say the court of Japan had twisted your words.”
“It was a kindness,” said Bae Gu.
They sat for a while in the sun. Below them on the lagoon a fisherman was poling his boat along the edge of the reeds, slowly, as if he had nowhere at all to be.
“You know what is in the reply,” said Masakazu.
“I know who will read it.” Bae Gu turned his cup in his hands. “It will be carried across the sea with great care, in a lacquer box, under your Council’s seal. When I come ashore it will be taken from me at the gate and sent up to the king’s house. And there some clerk will break the seal, and read it aloud, and that will be the end of the matter.” He found, a little to his surprise, that he could say this without any difficulty at all. “Do not distress yourself. I have read a great many documents aloud to kings. I know exactly how little the clerk feels.”
Dongping. Spring, 930
The worms got into the Wen Xuan that spring.
Not the water-stained copy on the laments shelf, which the worms had long ago given up as inedible, but a newer one from the South, on soft paper, folded into leaves and bound at the spine. The first warm week a family of bookworms ate a tunnel through the whole ninth chapter, so that every poem on travel had the same small round hole in the same place.
Ryeon mended them. The other scribes would not; it was slow, and it made your eyes ache. You damped the paper round the hole until it went soft. You tore a scrap from the blank leaves at the back of the same book, so that the paper matched and the edge was furred, and pasted it over with the thinnest wheat paste you could make, and pressed it under a stone. If a character had been eaten, you wrote it back in on the patch, in the copyist’s hand. When it was dry you could hardly find the place. She liked it.
The prince’s mounter had taught her that, her first winter in this city, and one harder thing besides: how to work a thin blade into the edge of a damp sheet and tease the written surface away from its back. She had asked him to show her again. He had put down the scroll he was mounting and found her a spoiled sheet. That same winter the Emperor’s men took him north to be asked about a seal, and did not bring him back. His bench was still by the east window of the mounting room, with a bowl of paste gone hard.
She was halfway through the ninth chapter when the steward came to say that a rider had come from the Emperor’s camp, and the prince wanted her in the painting hall, now.
The decree was on yellow silk, rolled on an ivory rod, and the rider who had brought it was standing by the brazier in the painting hall with snow melting off his boots. He was a Khitan officer of the Emperor’s guard, and he had been told, plainly, to watch it read.
The prince was at his table. He had a horse half finished in front of him, a roan, rolling in a meadow with its legs in the air. He kept hold of his brush.
“My reader will read it,” he said.
The officer looked at Ryeon and opened his mouth. Then he saw the prince’s face and shut it again.
Ryeon unrolled the silk. It was written in the formal Chinese of the Emperor’s secretariat, in a big, square, important hand, the kind of hand that expects to be read out in halls. She read it out in the painting hall, to forty-one horses and a roan rolling in a meadow.
It said, at length and with quotations, that the Emperor had named his youngest brother Lihu as his heir, with the command of all the armies under Heaven, and that all the princes and lords were to rejoice.
She knew what it meant before she reached the end of the first column. Their father had called himself the Heavenly Emperor, and their mother the Earthly Empress, and he had made his eldest son the Human King: Heaven, Earth and Man. Ryeon had copied that title for three years without once thinking what it was for. It was for the eldest son. Now the youngest, who was said to be the cruellest of the three and the one their mother loved best, had the armies and the succession. Not the prince. Not the prince’s son.
She read it to the end. She did not change her voice.
When she had finished there was a long silence in the hall. The officer of the guard stood by the brazier watching the prince, as he had been told to.
The prince looked at the roan in its meadow. Then he wiped his brush, carefully, on the edge of the inkstone, and laid it across the gap in the celadon mountains, and folded his hands on the table in front of him.
“Tell my brother,” he said to the officer, in Khitan, pleasantly, “that I rejoice.”
The officer bowed and went out.
The prince did not pick up the brush again. Ryeon stood at the end of the table with the yellow silk in her hands and waited, because she had not been dismissed. He had forgotten she was there. She rolled up the decree, and laid it on the table, and went out quietly, and he did not look up.
The roan was still rolling in its meadow the next morning, half finished, with its legs in the air. It was still there a week later. The brush was still lying across the mountains, and the ink on it had dried hard.
Before the week was out, the steward had begun to watch her carry the basket with the face he kept for horses that had gone lame. A prince who did not paint did not need a reader. So she stopped reading only what came in the basket, and began to choose.
She read him the worst poem in the archive, because he had once laughed at a bad one. She read him a treatise on the diseases of horses. Nothing.
She noticed the window on the morning of the diseases of horses.
She was crossing behind the painting hall on her way to the kitchen, because it was shorter, and she glanced up at the south side, out of habit, the way she glanced at every wall she passed, counting. The fourth window from the end had new paper in it.
The paste was still pale along the frame. The paper in the windows on either side had yellowed over the winter.
Then she looked at her own fingers.
There was ink on them. There was always ink on them. There had been ink on them the night Ruan held her up to that window. She had taken pains over the frame and the groove and the seal on the door. She had not once spared a thought for the paper beside her fingers.
Somebody, quietly, had cut her fingerprints out of the prince’s window and taken them away.
She knew who. Only one other person in the house kept lists of everything.
She went back to the library. She sat on her stool and looked at the ninth chapter of the Wen Xuan, with its patch in the same place on every leaf, until she could think. Then she went to see Yuzhi before he could send for her.
He was at his desk, with his brushes in their row and his dispatch box closed and locked in the middle of it. He did not look surprised to see her. She had not expected him to.
Nor did he speak. He finished the line he was writing, and laid down his brush, and waited.
She had prepared what she would say on the way across the court, and had thrown most of it away by the door. It was too clever. Clever was what had got her here.
“I took something out of the painting hall,” she said. “On the night of the loose horse. You know I did. You took the window.”
“I took the paper,” said Yuzhi, “the morning the decree came, when it began to be worth something. The window is still there.” He opened a drawer of his desk and took out a square of window paper, folded once. He unfolded it on the desk between them. Near one corner, quite clear, as clear as the prince’s on her poem, were the prints of two small fingers and the side of a thumb, in ink.
“The register of the painting hall cabinet lists one box of household registers,” he said. “Eleven sheets. On the eleventh day of the New Year, after the officers left, there were ten. The missing sheet was dated the tenth month of the second year of Tianxian.” He folded the paper again. “I have not asked you what it said. I do not need to. I made a copy of it myself, two years ago, the week it was written.” He glanced, once, at a pigeonhole high on the left-hand wall. “I have it still. Mine has eleven chests. I gather the one you took has acquired a twelfth since.”
Eleven. The twelfth chest, the short one, with the inkstone and the seals and her, had been added afterwards. And still: not sent it north. He had had the proof of the prince’s flight in his own wall for two years, and the Emperor did not. She tried to think why a man would keep a thing like that instead of sending it to his master, and the only reason she could find was that he was saving it for himself, for later. She did not much like that reason.
“I am not going to ask you to give it back, either,” said Yuzhi. “It is safer with you than in that cabinet. The officers will come again next year. They are not as stupid as they let you think.” He laid his hand flat on the folded paper. “So tell me, Lady Bae. You have come here before I sent for you, which was intelligent of you. What are you offering?”
She had come ready for that, too.
“Poems,” she said.
He waited.
“Not real ones. Safe ones.” She made herself go slowly. “Things that are true and don’t hurt anybody. What the prince read. What he painted. Who came to the house. You want to know what goes on in the painting hall, and nobody else can tell you, because nobody else goes in. I’ll tell you. Every week. And you’ll keep the window paper in your drawer, and not show it to anybody, ever.”
“Harmless true things.”
“Yes.”
“In exchange for my silence about a sheet of paper that proves the prince has been packed to leave for two years, with you, I imagine, in the twelfth chest.”
“Yes,” said Ryeon, because there was nothing else to say.
He looked at her as he had looked at her poem in autumn, at his window, before he found the fourth line.
“I accept the poems,” he said. “On the first and fifteenth of each month. Written, not spoken. In your own words.” He paused. “I will want one more thing, which is not a poem.”
She waited.
“When the prince goes,” said Yuzhi, “and he will go, Lady Bae, you know that as well as I do; the only question left in Dongdan is whether he goes quietly. I will want to know when.”
Not whether. Only when.
“I don’t know when,” she said.
“No. But you will, before anyone else in this house.” He took up his brush again. “You told me in autumn that your father was alive. Here is something in exchange. When he comes home from Japan, whatever he said there will come home with him, in writing. And what it says will decide whether he hangs.” He dipped the brush. “I thought you should know that before you decided how good you would be at keeping your promises.”
She stood there.
“That is all, Lady Bae,” said Yuzhi, and went back to his line.
She wrote the first safe poem that night, and gave it to him on the fifteenth.
The prince read the Fu on the Western Capital again. He did not paint. Lady Xiao’s cat had five kittens in the linen store. One is grey. The steward was bitten by the big chestnut again, on the same hand.
Yuzhi read it in front of her, standing at his window, twice. Then he put it in a pigeonhole with a new wooden tag on it, which said in Khitan script something she could not read, and nodded, and went back to his work.
On the first of the next month she gave him: The prince did not paint. He read the Book of Songs, the part about the crickets. Hulan says there are going to be more geese this year. The grey kitten is the biggest. The prince’s ship is still at the river mouth and has a new mast.
She stopped, after she had written the last sentence, and read it over. It was true. Everybody in the house knew. Hulan’s brother had seen the mast go up. It could not hurt anyone, because it was not a secret, and it would make Yuzhi believe the rest.
She left it in.
Ruan came back in the second week after the decree.
He came in by the door, this time, which was how she knew it was serious. He was carrying his copybook under his arm and a bow case over his shoulder, and he stood in the doorway of the library for a while, looking at the shelves, before he spoke.
“I want to learn properly,” he said. “Not copying. Reading. So I can read things myself.”
“Your tutor…”
“My tutor makes me copy the Thousand Characters until my hand falls off and then he hits it.” Ruan came in and put the copybook on her desk. “You said cold was a house with ice under it. Nobody ever told me that. They just told me to do it again.” He looked at the floor. “I want to be able to read the things in the painting hall. The ones he writes on the paintings. The little poems at the side.” He lifted his chin. “I want to be able to read what he writes about me.”
She remembered the faceless boy on the dun pony. There had been no poem on that one. There had been no writing at all.
“All right,” she said.
“And I’ll teach you the bow.” He said it quickly, before she could refuse, as though it were a debt he had been meaning to pay. “You can’t do anything with your body. I’ve seen you get on a stool. It’s terrible.”
That was so true that she could not even be offended.
So that spring, in the hour after the prince’s empty mornings, when the painting hall stood silent and she had nobody to read to, she taught Ruan to read characters as pictures, the way her father had taught her on the warm floor. She did it in ink, not water, because he needed to keep them.
She began with his own name.
“阮,” she said, and wrote it large. “This side, on the left, the bit like an ear. When it’s on the left it’s a hill. Look, it’s steps going up.” She drew the steps in the air for him. “And this side is 元. That’s a person, with a very big head on top. It means first. The head. The beginning of something.”
Ruan studied it.
“A hill,” he said, “and a beginning.”
“Yes.”
“Is that why he chose it?”
“I don’t know,” said Ryeon honestly. “You’d have to ask him.”
Ruan said nothing to that. But he wrote 阮 thirty times on the next page, carefully, and by the thirtieth the head on the person was the right size.
As a reward she gave him an easy one. She drew a mountain, three peaks with the middle one tallest, and then another mountain standing on top of it, and squeezed the two together until they were one character. 出. “Two mountains stacked up,” she said. “Like when you climb over one, and there’s another one behind it, and you have to keep going. Out. Going out.”
Ruan liked that one. He drew mountains standing on mountains all down the margin.
A few lessons later he held the brush out to her. “Now yours.”
She dipped her finger in the water dish by the inkstone instead, and wrote it on the desk, where it would dry. 裴蓮. She had not written it in her own hand since Sanggyeong.
“The first one’s a coat,” she said. “That’s the collar, and that’s the hem. And these, sticking out on top, are wings. A coat with wings. That’s my family.”
Ruan laughed, and said he would have liked a coat with wings, and copied it into his margin under the mountains before the water went, badly, with wings like a bat’s. By the time he looked up to ask about the second one, it had gone.
In exchange he took her out to the archery yard, early, before anyone else was about, and put a child’s bow in her hands. She was terrible. The string slapped the inside of her wrist so hard she yelped, and the arrow went sideways into the snow.
“You’re holding your breath,” said Ruan.
“I’m concentrating.”
“You’re holding your breath like somebody’s going to hit you. You count everything. So count your breath. In for four. Hold for two. Let it go on the out.”
She tried it. In for four. Hold for two. The string went out of her fingers on the breath, almost by itself, and the arrow went more or less forward and hit the straw butt low down near the edge, and stayed there.
She stared at it.
“That’s terrible,” said Ruan, with deep satisfaction. “That’s the best thing you’ve ever done.”
They went back across the yard together. At the corner of the stable he stopped, and kicked at a lump of frozen mud, and said, without looking at her, “Why do you think he didn’t paint my face?”
She had been waiting for him to ask. She had thought of a great many answers, in the nights since. Most of them were kind, and none of them were true, or at least she did not know if they were.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But he painted Dusk’s lip hanging down. And your hands on the reins the way your tutor makes you hold them, too tight. He was looking very hard at everything else.” She thought about it. “Maybe he was waiting to see what it would turn into.”
Ruan kicked the mud again. It came loose and skittered across the ice.
“He could ask,” he said.
He went into the stable to see the pony. Ryeon went back to the library, and the patched ninth chapter, and the next worm hole.
For the rest of the spring the roan lay untouched on his table. She went on choosing, and at the morning reading the prince kept his eyes on the window.
On the twentieth morning she brought a scroll of the Records of the Grand Historian from the library under her arm, the one on the house of Wu, and unrolled it at the end of the table, and began to read without being asked. She read it from the beginning: how Taibo and his brother Zhongyong saw that their father wished to give the kingdom to their youngest brother, and fled south together to the land of the Jing barbarians, and cut their hair short and tattooed their bodies after the custom of that country, to show that they could never be kings at home. How the Jing barbarians thought him righteous, and a thousand households followed him, and they made him their lord.
She reached the end of the sentence and looked up, because there was no more. The next line said only that Taibo died without a son, and his brother ruled after him.
The prince was looking at the window.
“There,” he said. “You see. Not one word.” Then he turned his head and looked at her, for the first time in twenty days. “You chose that, reader.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“A thousand households,” said the prince. “And not one word on what he did with them. It must have been a great deal of work.” He looked at the dry brush lying across the celadon mountains. “Read it again.”
She read it again. He did not paint. But he listened, and the next morning he asked for something himself, and the steward stopped looking at her like a lame horse.
One morning near the end of spring she came early, before the steward, and met Lady Gao coming out of the painting hall. Lady Gao was holding her left wrist in her right hand, under the sleeve, quite hard. She neither stopped nor spoke. She only bent her head and went past. Inside, the prince sat at his table with colour in his face for the first time in weeks, almost cheerful. As she came in he wiped something dark from the corner of his lip with his thumb. The steward came in by the other door and carried away on a tray a small white cup with a dark ring dried at the bottom of it. Ink did not dry brown at the edges, like an old scab. The prince asked for the Songs of Chu, and talked about it, and was charming for an hour. Ryeon read, and understood nothing, and knew that she understood nothing, and put it on the list at the bottom, where the heavy things went.
A few days later she came in and saw that the little painting on the last table but one, under the book, was gone. The book was still there. She looked for the painting, carefully, down the whole length of the tables, while the prince sat with his back to her and his hands folded and the brush dry across the celadon peaks.
She did not ask where it was. She sat down on her stool and opened the basket and read him a horse levy, two pages, with sums.