Chapter Six
What the Sea Brought
Dongping. Summer, 930
The ice went out of the river mouth in the third month, and in the fifth the ships came back.
Ryeon heard about it from Hulan, who heard everything from her brother, who had been moved from the stable to the river gate and now considered himself an authority on the sea. Two ships from the Tang, with salt and southern silk. A Goryeo ship with paper. And a little Silla trader with a patched brown sail that had gone south before the freeze, and been to Dengzhou, and to Silla, and then across to Japan, to Hakata, the harbour under Dazaifu where the foreign ships put in. It had come all the way back again, and was now tied up at the river wharf, unloading lacquer.
“My brother says the captain’s mad,” said Hulan. “He says nobody goes to Japan and back in one winter. He says the man must have married a sea dragon’s daughter.”
“Did he say what the captain brought back?”
“Lacquer.” Hulan considered. “And a parrot. My brother says it swears in four languages and he tried to teach it Khitan and it bit him.”
Ryeon went back to the library and sat on her stool and looked at the wall.
Japan. Hakata was the wrong end of Japan; the Balhae ships had always gone to Tango, on the north coast. But men talked in harbours. If anything had happened to an envoy from Dongdan, somebody in Hakata would have heard it.
She could not ask Lady Gao, who told you a thing once and then not again for a long time; Ryeon had learned that much since autumn. The prince heard about half of what she read him; the rest of the time he looked at the window. And she was paying Yuzhi already, twice a month.
On the fifteenth her safe poem told Yuzhi about the grey kitten, which had learned to climb Lady Xiao’s curtains and been put in the stable. Ruan had taken it. Nothing about a ship from Hakata. Yuzhi read it and put it in the pigeonhole.
That afternoon she went to Lady Gao’s rooms with a basket of mended linen, and set it down, and while Lady Gao was in the inner room she took the bronze token off the writing table, from under the lotus tile, and put it in her sleeve.
The guards at the gate weighed the token, and her, and the token again.
“Lady Gao’s errand,” said Ryeon, in Khitan. “To the Silla merchant. For floss.”
She had practised the voice. It was Hulan’s voice, a little bored, a little put-upon, the voice of a servant who has been sent out in the heat for something nobody really needed. The older guard looked at her for a moment longer than she liked. Then he shrugged and swung the gate.
The street was different in summer. It smelled of horses and drains and fried dough, and the Balhae people from the lower town had spread out from their sheds onto the riverbank, where the grass had come up, and were hanging out washing and mending nets and arguing at the tops of their voices, mostly in Malgal, now and then in the speech of the capital. She went through them quickly, with her head down, a Khitan servant on an errand, who understood none of it.
Choe Ung was on his ship.
It was very small. That was what she thought first, standing on the wharf looking down at it: so small that it seemed impossible it had crossed any sea at all, let alone three. It had one mast and a patched brown sail furled along a yard, and a deck crowded with bales. In the stern, under an awning, a little dried-up man in a long brown coat was sitting cross-legged on a mat eating a persimmon, although it was entirely the wrong season for persimmons. On a perch beside him sat a green parrot.
“The prince’s reader,” said Choe Ung, in Silla speech, without looking up. “Come aboard. Mind the third plank. It’s honest, but it’s tired.”
She minded the third plank.
The parrot looked at her with one eye and said something that seemed to be made mostly of vowels, which made Choe Ung laugh.
“Japanese,” he said. “Hakata dock words. Three strings of cash I paid for him, and the words came free. I won’t tell you what they mean.” He finished his persimmon and wiped his fingers and finally looked at her. “Lady Gao did not send you.”
“No.”
“You took her token.”
She did not answer that, which was an answer.
“You want news,” said Choe Ung. “Everybody who comes down that wharf wants news. News I sell. Lacquer I sell, nine cases. This year a parrot also, very cheap. What do you buy with?”
She had been asking herself that the whole way down the street. She had no money. She had never had any. She had a bone knife, and a box of other people’s handwriting under the library floor, and her hand.
“What do you need written?” she said.
He needed a great deal written. He was, it turned out, a merchant of four languages who could speak all of them and write none of them well, and he had a stack of letters under the awning that he had been dreading for a month: a petition to the harbour clerks at Dengzhou about a cargo of ginseng that had been taxed twice; a letter to a Goryeo paper-maker about a debt; a list of goods for a Japanese buyer at Hakata, which had to be in Chinese, because that was what the Japanese read; and, hardest of all, a letter to a widow in Silla, whose husband had been his partner and had gone down with a ship off Tsushima the winter before.
She wrote them all, in the library hand, as she wrote anything that strangers would read. She sat on his mat in the shade of the awning with her own brush and his wretched ink. He told her what he wanted to say in his stepping-stone mix of Silla words and quay Chinese, slowly, with his hands, and she turned it into proper Chinese, the right kind of Chinese for each one: the harbour clerks’ stiff official forms, the paper-maker’s polite threats, the Japanese buyer’s careful list. The widow’s letter took longest. Choe Ung kept starting it and stopping. In the end Ryeon wrote it plainly, the way she would have wanted somebody to write to her, and when she read it back to him, putting it into his own plain quay Chinese a line at a time, he was quiet a while, and then nodded, and looked away at the river.
“Good hand,” he said. “Letter-writer on Dengzhou quay, forty cash a sheet, and he writes worse.”
Ryeon let that pass. Choe Ung looked at her as he had in the warm room by the river, as if she were a squall coming up from an odd direction. Then he took the letters from her one by one, and blew on them, and stacked them, and put them away.
He leaned out from under the awning and whistled up at the wharf.
A man got up from beside the bollard at the bow. He had been squatting there on his heels since before Ryeon came, so still that she had taken him for part of the cargo. He came aboard minding the third plank, and stood at the edge of the mat with his cap in his hands: a Balhae man from the lower town, with net-cord burns across both palms and a letter in his belt.
“Goryeo letter,” said Choe Ung. “From his sister. Nine days now he sits there with it. On this wharf, nobody reads.” He looked at the cap. “Reading, ten cash. For him, five.”
The man held the letter out to her. It had been folded small, and opened, and folded again so many times that it had gone soft as cloth along the creases. Ryeon read it to him in her voice for sums, putting it into Balhae as she went. He stared when she began, a Khitan servant girl talking like the inner city, and then forgot to.
To my elder brother at Dongping, from his younger sister. We are alive. The roof fell in under the snow at New Year, and the headman’s sons put it up again, so we owe the headman two days at the salt pans for each son, which is six. The debt to Pak the boatman is paid, all but forty cash. My son coughs at night, but less since the thaw. Millet is ninety cash the measure.
The man nodded at each thing as it came, as if it were being counted into his hands.
There is a woman of the capital in the village now, of the Yang house, with a boy of about five. She teaches the village children their characters in the sand. Ours knows twenty.
Her thumb had gone to the margin beside that column and was pressing it flat. The paper was flat already. She read on.
Do not send money by the Silla man. Come when you can.
At the far end of the mat Choe Ung said something to the parrot, and the parrot said something back.
“The boy,” said the man. “Again.”
She read it again. My son coughs at night, but less since the thaw.
He nodded, and took the letter back, and folded it along its own creases, and put it inside his coat. He paid Choe Ung five cash, one at a time, and went up onto the wharf and was lost among the washing.
“Which village?” said Ryeon.
“Goryeo side. Inside Long Mountain cape, two bays down.” Choe Ung dropped the five cash into a pouch. “Salt village. One well, forty roofs, half of them Balhae now, very bad dogs. Ninety for millet, that’s right. Seventh month, a hundred and ten. I sell needles there, twenty packets every spring. Goryeo needles bend.”
Ryeon looked at the place on the mat where the letter had lain.
“So,” he said. “Paid. What do you want to know?”
“There was an embassy,” said Ryeon. “From Dongdan to Japan. Last winter.”
“Ah.” He showed no surprise. “The famous one.”
“Why famous?”
Choe Ung settled himself more comfortably on his mat, and the parrot sidled along its perch to sit nearer his shoulder, and he told her.
The whole of Hakata had been talking about it, he said: the officials up at Dazaifu in their offices, the merchants in the warehouses, even the girls gutting fish on the waterfront, who as a rule talked about fish. For three months the envoy from Dongdan had said what an envoy ought to say. Then one morning in the spring, for no reason anybody could discover, he had stood up and said that it was all lies.
“There is no kingdom of Dongdan,” said Choe Ung. “That is how they tell it. A garrison with a name painted on the gate. And a great deal more about the Khitan king, which the gentlemen in Dazaifu enjoyed repeating, and I won’t.” He shook his head slowly, with something like admiration. “When I sailed, the court had asked him to write down which of his answers he wished them to believe. They send him home, of course. A refused envoy always goes home with the court’s reply under seal, and it will say whatever he wrote. The gentlemen in Dazaifu thought it was the funniest thing they had heard in years. An envoy who calls his own king a bandit, in writing, and then goes home to him.”
The persimmon’s little green cap lay on the mat by his knee, with its four leaves curled up at the tips.
“Do you know why?” she said. Her voice sounded strange to her, thin and far off, like a voice through a wall. “Why he changed?”
“Nobody knows,” said Choe Ung. “The Japanese think he went mad from the rain.”
She had sent it to him.
Keep in your heart one inch of red.
She had meant a lotus bud. She had meant come and get me. Every reader in two empires would see a heart, she had told herself. She had never thought to count him among them.
The river went by under the stern, and the parrot muttered to itself. Her father had stood up in front of the court of Japan. For a moment she wanted to run all the way back up the street and tell Hulan, as Hulan told everybody about her brother. And it was going to kill him.
“Little reader,” said Choe Ung. He sounded, for the first time, uncertain. “You’ve gone a bad colour.”
She was holding her breath, the way Ruan said she did, as if somebody were going to hit her. She made herself let it go.
“When does he come home?” she said.
“When the winds turn. Late summer. Early autumn, perhaps.” Choe Ung was watching her closely now. “Little reader. Listen. Twenty-six years in this trade, and this one I give you for nothing. On the quay, talk goes out with the tide. Nobody hangs for talk, not in Hakata, not here. Paper is different. Written down, and sealed, and carried to them in a box: for that they hang you.” He leaned forward. “I would not want to be the box.”
She looked at him.
“Have you told anybody else? What they’re saying in Hakata?”
“You are the first who asked,” said Choe Ung. “And you paid very well. Four letters, one to a widow.” He sat back. “Some news is worth silver, some news is worth a rope. This one I sell to nobody.”
“Not even Lord Yuzhi?”
He looked at her for a moment, and the corner of his walnut face moved a fraction.
“Especially not,” he said. “Lord Yuzhi hasn’t asked. Lord Yuzhi asks about everything.”
She stood up. Her legs were stiff from sitting, and one of them had gone to sleep, and she nearly fell over the tired third plank on her way off the ship. At the end of the wharf she turned round.
“The painting,” she said. “The one with the tiger. Did you take it?”
“To Dengzhou. To the governor’s man, at the harbour.” Choe Ung smiled for the first time, a small, private smile. “He unrolled it on the quay, in the wind, and read it, and went quite white. Then he rolled it up very fast, and paid me twice the freight in silver, and told me to tell the King of Dongdan one thing, and nothing else.”
“What?”
“That the sea is calm in autumn.”
Lady Gao was waiting for her in the library.
She was sitting on the second stool, the one nobody used, in the half dark, with her hands in her sleeves. She did not say anything when Ryeon came in. She held out her hand.
Ryeon gave her the token.
Lady Gao turned it over in her fingers, and put it away. In the dusk, with the light behind her, her face was hard to read.
“You went to Choe Ung,” she said, in Balhae.
“Yes.”
“You go to Yuzhi on the first and the fifteenth of every month. You take him a paper. I have seen you crossing the court. What do you take him?”
Ryeon had promised herself, walking up the street, that she would not cry, and she held to that now, though only just. She told Lady Gao about the window paper with her fingerprints on it. She told her about the safe poems, and about Lady Xiao’s kittens, and about the ship’s new mast, and about when. She told her what Choe Ung had said on the ship. She told it all in order, as if she were reading out a horse levy, two pages, with sums, and at the end she stopped.
Lady Gao’s hands had gone back into her sleeves.
“Yuzhi knows you are your father’s daughter,” she said at last. “He knew in autumn. And he knows you took the list.”
“Yes.”
“And you have been telling him harmless things.”
“Yes.”
“The mast,” said Lady Gao. It came out low, and bitter. “You told that man about the mast. In writing.” She put a hand over her eyes. “I should have seen. I should have watched you more closely.”
The mat under the awning, and the persimmon cap, and a woman of the Yang house teaching characters in the sand, and the funniest thing they had heard in years: Ryeon had carried them all the way up from the wharf as you carry a bowl that is too full, slowly, watching the rim. Now it spilled.
“You did watch me,” she said. “You watched me for three years. You watched me so closely nobody ever told me he was alive.”
Lady Gao took her hand away from her eyes.
“Somebody in this house decided not to tell me,” said Ryeon. Her voice was shaking, and she let it. “For three years. I thought he was dead at the gate. Everybody let me think so. And then one day, all of a sudden, somebody decided I could know. Somebody gave me his name on a list and let me write him a poem.” She heard herself, too loud, in the library where you never raised your voice. “That was you.”
The light was almost gone. Lady Gao’s face was only a pale shape in the dark.
“Yes,” she said. “That was me.”
She told it in Balhae, slowly, like something she had told herself a great many times and never once said out loud.
“When the city fell,” she said, “I was on the steps of the inner palace. Nineteen. I had been at court a year. Your mother came up the steps through the smoke, carrying you. You were seven and too big to carry, and she was carrying you anyway, and your brother, the little one, Seon, was tied on her back. We had never spoken. She put you into my arms and said, You are a Gao. They will keep you. Keep her alive. And she went back down the steps, into the smoke, with your brother on her back, to look for your father and your elder brother. And I never saw her again.”
It was too dark now to see her face. There was only her voice, low and even.
“The prince took me that week. He took a great many things that week. His soldiers took you out of my arms on the steps and put you on a cart with the other children, and I could not stop them.”
Ryeon heard a sleeve being drawn down over a wrist.
“I found you two days later, in the snow outside the walls, still on the cart, writing on the frost on its side with your finger. I told the prince you were mine. He let me keep you because I would not stop saying it, and because somebody told him you could write the Thousand Characters from memory, and he thought that was charming.” A pause. “The year after, in the tenth month, when he was packing the chests, I asked him to put you on the list. I said that I had made a promise to your mother. He had eleven chests packed already. He wrote you down at the bottom of a twelfth. I did not know if he meant it. I still do not know.”
“And my father?”
“I knew he was alive by then too. They had carried him north with the other officials, out on the steppe. Choe Ung found out for me.” A longer pause. “I did not tell you.”
“Why?”
“Because you were eight,” said Lady Gao, “and he was weeks away across the snow. And a child who knows her father is alive runs to him in the snow. I have seen children do it, on the roads north, that first winter, when they marched the villages up onto the steppe.” Her voice cracked very slightly, and steadied. “They do not get there.”
Ryeon stood in the dark.
“And then he was to be sent to Japan,” said Lady Gao. “Across the sea. And you cannot run across a sea. So I could give you his name.”
“He was three walls away for three days,” said Ryeon. “Before he sailed. In the secretariat quarter. I could have run to him then.”
“Under guard, and on Yuzhi’s list,” said Lady Gao. “A child who ran to him then would have hanged him. And you did not run. You wrote a poem. I knew you would; you are his daughter. I could give you one poem’s worth of him, and nothing worse could come of it than a poem.” She made a small sound in the dark that was not a laugh. “That is what I thought. I thought I was being careful.”
“Why didn’t anybody tell him?” said Ryeon. “That I was here. They could have. We have her; be careful what you say.”
“I asked the prince that, once.” Lady Gao was quiet a moment. “He said a hostage is a thing you have to use, and he did not want to use you. He said he would rather see what your father did when he found you for himself.” A pause. “I did not like how he said it.”
Neither of them spoke.
“Is my mother alive?” said Ryeon.
“I do not know,” said Lady Gao, and nothing else.
“I read a letter on Choe Ung’s ship,” said Ryeon. “From Goryeo. There’s a woman of the Yang house in a village by the sea, with a boy of about five.”
For a while there was no sound from the stool.
“Yes,” said Lady Gao. “Choe Ung carries my packets over to Goryeo. He brought me word of her before the river froze. I had not decided whether to tell you. She says her husband was an envoy.” And then, lower: “Yang is a common name.”
Ryeon’s mother had been a Yang. Seon would be five.
She sat down on the floor of the library, quite suddenly, because her legs had stopped working, and stayed there.
After a while Lady Gao got up off the stool and came and knelt on the floor beside her, a hand’s breadth away, close enough that Ryeon could smell the faint sweetness of the oil she used on her hair. Outside, the last of the light went out of the paper windows, and somewhere in the court the big chestnut whinnied, and was answered from the stable.
“Your arm,” said Ryeon at last, into the dark. “The marks.”
Beside her, a sleeve was drawn down again.
“It is something he needs sometimes,” said Lady Gao, after a moment. “It is not your business. It is not your fault. And I would rather you looked at something else.”
Ryeon put it at the bottom of the list, with the white cup.
When Lady Gao had gone, she lit the lamp, and took up the loose board behind the eleventh shelf, and took out the list.
Daughter of the Bae house. One.
The tiger painting had reached the Tang. The Tang had answered. The sea is calm in autumn. Choe Ung had said her father would come home in late summer, or early autumn. The prince’s ship had a new mast. The books were still packed.
In the autumn the prince would go, fast, by sea, with only the things he had decided were books. And her father would come home through the gate with a sealed box, and the prince would be gone, and the house would be Yuzhi’s, and the box would be opened.
She went down the list by the lamp, chest by chest. Her father was not on it. Nobody on it was a person, except her.
If he’s on the list, she thought, he’s a book.
It was a foolish thought. She kept it anyway.
She sat with the list on her knee, and the brush in her other hand, and did not dip it.
Not yet. First she had to know when, and how, and what the prince would do if he saw. She put the list back under the board, and the board back over the box. Then she lay on her matting in the dark and counted the days until autumn. There were more of them than windows.