Chapter Seven
Daughter of the Bae House, One
Tango. Summer, 930 (Bae Gu)
They gave him back the sables.
Bae Gu had not expected that. The gifts of a rejected embassy were usually kept, as a sort of fee for the trouble; he had read of it being done to the Silla envoys, long ago. But the court of Japan, having found that the King of Dongdan was not a king, had evidently decided that it could not accept a king’s presents either, and so on the morning of his departure the chest came down to the beach on the shoulders of province men and was loaded back into the hold, every pelt, bald patches and all.
He supposed he should take it as a compliment to his candour. He found he could not take it as anything at all.
The court’s reply came last. A province official carried it down in both hands, in a box of black lacquer bound with red cord, the knot under a paper strip stamped with the vermilion seal of the Council of State, and put it into Bae Gu’s hands on the sand in front of the whole embassy, and bowed, and said the formal words. Bae Gu said the formal words back. Then he stood holding it while the tide came in round the boats, and the men of his company looked anywhere but at him.
It was not heavy. A few sheets of good Japanese paper, closely written. It would weigh less, he thought, than any of the sables.
He had considered, in the long wet nights at the guesthouse, what a sensible man would do with it. A sensible man would drop it over the side in the middle of the sea, on a dark night, and come home with a tale of a storm. It would not even be difficult. He had crossed this sea five times; he knew how it behaved, and so did every Dongdan official who might want to ask.
But he had carried other men’s letters for thirty years, and in thirty years he had never once opened one that was not addressed to him, nor lost one that was. An envoy is a box with legs. That was what his first master in the secretariat had told him, at nineteen, and he had laughed, and then spent thirty years finding out that it was the whole of the art. You carried what you were given. You put it into the hands it was meant for. What it said was not your business, and what it did to you was not your business either.
He had written one honest thing in Japan. It seemed a pity to come home and spoil it with a lie about the weather.
He put the box under his arm.
Some days before, he had sent a poem up to the capital, to Masakazu: a quatrain on parting, nothing remarkable, the sort of thing envoys had been writing to each other across this sea for two hundred years. He had asked the courier to wait for an answer. The courier came back down on the morning of the sailing, empty-handed. He said that the gentleman had received it, and had read it, and had sent no reply; and, lowering his voice, that the capital was full of omens that summer, and nobody there was answering anything.
Bae Gu found that he bore him no grudge for that either. Masakazu had folded a confession in three once already, and not asked about its last line.
The tide was full. Somebody called from the boats. He went down the sand with the box under his arm, and climbed in over the side with his bad knees, and sat with his back to Japan, which he was fairly certain he would never see again.
Dongping. Summer, 930
On the first of the sixth month she took Yuzhi her safe poem early, as she always did. The prince did not paint. The geese are moulting. The prince’s ship has had pitch on its seams.
He read it twice, standing at his window. Then he went to his desk, where the morning’s returns lay in a stack, and took the top one, and inked his seal, and pressed it at the foot, and turned the sheet face down on a second pile. He did all of it without looking at her. She saw the wharf master’s mark in the corner as it went over, and nothing else.
“The pitch,” said Yuzhi. “Who told you?”
“Hulan’s brother, my lord.”
“Hulan’s brother.” He wrote two characters on a tally slip, small, and she could not see what they were.
He put her poem in the pigeonhole with the Khitan tag. She bowed and went out.
The summer returns came to the painting hall that afternoon: two baskets of them, from every granary and storehouse and pasture in Dongdan, and Ryeon read them all to the prince, one after another, in her voice for sums.
The prince listened with his eyes half shut. At a wrong figure he would say Again, and she would read it again, and he would say, Nine, not ten. Tell Yuzhi. He was always right. She did not know how he did it.
Toward the bottom of the second basket was the return from the river wharf. She read it the same way as the others.
Received into the wharf store, by order: parched millet for a journey, forty baskets. Dried mutton, twelve sides. Water jars, new, stoppered, twenty. Rope, hemp, two hundred spans. Pitch, three jars.
She stopped.
It was a ship’s provision. Nothing else at a river wharf needed forty baskets of parched millet and twenty new water jars. And at the bottom of the return, beside the wharf master’s mark, was a small square seal in red, the seal that meant the return had been examined and found in order. It was Yuzhi’s.
She looked at the seal for longer than she meant to. Yuzhi read everything. He read grain returns more carefully than most men read love letters, and he would have seen at a glance what forty baskets of parched millet were for. He had seen. That morning, in front of her, he had put his seal on it and turned it face down, and asked her about pitch.
“Go on,” said the prince, with his eyes closed.
“Pitch, three jars,” Ryeon read. “That’s all, Your Highness.”
The prince opened his eyes. He looked at the white window for a moment. Then, for the first time since the decree, he almost smiled.
“Parched millet,” he said. “Forty baskets. How very dull. Put it with the others.” He was silent a moment. “And bring me the register of the twelve chests.”
Her hands went still on the basket.
“From the cabinet, Your Highness?”
“No,” said the prince. “It is not in the cabinet. I looked.” He did not turn his head. “Find it for me, reader. I expect you know where it is. Tomorrow will do.”
She did not sleep that night. She did not try.
She took up the board behind the eleventh shelf, and took out the list, and laid it on her desk under the lamp. Then she sat and looked at it, and at the inkstone, and at the brush, for most of the first watch.
He would give it to the steward. He had to. The steward would load the ship, in the dark, on the night, from the list: chest one, chest two, chest three, down to the twelfth, and then Daughter of the Bae house, one, and somebody would come and take her by the arm. The steward could read names and numbers and very little else, and he had never in his life argued with a list. He would load what this one said.
If he’s on the list, he’s a book.
It was still not a good plan. But a list was the only door she had ever seen the prince walk through.
And she knew the prince. She had read to him every morning for eight months. He did not go back to things. He read them twice at the time, with the eye and the hand, the way he had read her poem, and after that he remembered. He had written this list two years ago. He would not read it again.
And if he did, and saw, then he would know what she wanted. And in the great hall, after she lied for him to Lady Talan’s face, he had not looked at her once, on purpose, and he had never said thank you. She thought that perhaps he owed her one line.
She ground the ink.
Then she stopped, and tipped the inkstone to the lamp, and poured it away. It was the library’s ink, cheap soot heavy with glue, which the steward bought by the basket: warm, and glossy when it dried. The prince never used it. He wrote with pine-soot ink from Yizhou, which dried matt and faintly blue, like a winter sky at dusk. That ink on that page would sit like a crow on snow.
She went across the dark court to the painting hall, and in by the fourth window, which still lifted out of its groove, and found his ink stick lying by his inkstone where he had left it the last morning he painted. She shaved two slivers off the end of it with the bone knife, each no thicker than a fingernail, from the side he never used, and went back. She put one away, and ground the other thin, as he did, with more water than seemed right. She tried it on a scrap and held the scrap beside the list under the lamp. She could not tell them apart.
She had practised the prince’s hand for three years, on calligraphy models and book lists and the backs of his drafts. She had never once written anything in it that was not his. She found, when she picked up the brush, that her fingers were cold.
She thought, without wanting to, about the dealer’s man from the South, the winter before last, who had brought the prince a scroll that was not what it claimed to be. She had copied the prince’s letter of complaint. Nobody had told her what was done to the man. But she had seen him led out through the gate afterwards with his right hand wrapped in a cloth, and the cloth had been very red, and too small.
She dipped the brush.
At the bottom of the twelfth chest, under Daughter of the Bae house, one, there was a finger’s breadth of space before the edge of the paper. She wrote into it, slowly, in his careful, old-fashioned, beautiful hand, two characters for a name, and then the space, and then the one stroke.
裴璆 一
Then she laid the brush down, and sat back, and looked at it.
It was very good. She left it to dry on the desk under a weight, and lay down on the matting with her eyes open, and waited for the morning.
In the morning the prince sent her to Lady Xiao’s rooms with a book of poems, and she had to go, because the steward stood in the library door until she did. She could not lift the board behind the eleventh shelf with him watching, and she would not fold the sheet across the new line before the glue in its ink had set.
Lady Xiao kept her waiting for a long time in an outer room, while the grey kitten’s mother watched her from a cushion with yellow, disapproving eyes. The book was the Nineteen Old Poems, in a blue cover, with a strip of red paper put in near the front. Ryeon held it on her knees and counted the ways out of the room, which were two.
Then the inner door opened, and it was not a maid. It was Lady Xiao herself, in a plain summer coat, without the white fox, which made her seem smaller and younger than at the inventory. She sat down on the far side of the low table and held out her hand for the book, and opened it at the red paper, and studied the columns for a while as if she could make them speak by looking.
“He has marked one,” she said, in Khitan. “Read it to me.”
Ryeon read it through in Chinese first, because that was how it went, and then began to put it into Khitan, a line at a time. On and on, and on again. Parted from you while we both live. Ten thousand li between us, each at one edge of the sky. The road is hard, and long. Who knows when we shall meet?
She stopped at the seventh line.
胡馬依北風
越鳥巢南枝
The horse from the north leans into the north wind. The bird from the south nests on the southern branch. There was a softer way to put that into Khitan. There nearly always was.
“Not like that,” said Lady Xiao, before Ryeon had chosen. “Not as you read to Lady Talan. I watched your hands. Read it as it is.”
So Ryeon read it as it was: the horse and the bird, and the two of them further apart each day, and the belt hanging looser; the drifting cloud across the sun, and the traveller who does not turn his head to come back. And the end, which was the plainest thing in the book. Cast it all aside, and speak of it no more. Try to eat well.
Lady Xiao sat with the book open on her knee.
“He sent me poems when we were married,” she said after a while. “I could not read them. I had them read to me by a clerk who was afraid of me, and they were all about horses.” She closed the book. “This one has a horse in it too.”
The kitten’s mother got down off the cushion and went to her, and she put her hand on its back without looking at it.
“My son comes to the library,” she said.
“Yes, my lady.”
“He writes his name. He showed me. A whole page of it.” Nothing happened to the line of her shoulders. “His tutor hits his hand, and you do not. He told me that as well.” She looked at Ryeon across the table for a long moment. “When the King goes south to his birds, my son stays here. With me. In his grandmother’s country.”
It had not been a question. Ryeon bowed.
“Thank the King for the book,” said Lady Xiao, and stood up. “Tell him I had it read.”
Ryeon walked back across the inner court as fast as she could without running, because the list was on her desk, and it should have been dry by now, and she had left the library door unbarred.
The library door was open.
Ruan was sitting on her stool.
He had his copybook open on the desk in front of him, as he did on the days they had lessons, and his brush in his hand, and a blot on his thumb. But he was not looking at the copybook. He was holding the list.
He had moved the weight off it. He was holding it up to the window in both hands, very close to his face, the way he held things when he was trying to read them, and his lips were moving.
She stood in the doorway.
He knew one and two and three, and woman, and book, and chest, and his own name. And he knew the coat with wings, because she had written it for him in the spring with a wet finger on the desk.
He knew his father’s hand. Everyone in the house knew the prince’s hand.
“It’s a list,” said Ruan. He did not look round. “Of what he’s taking.”
She did not say anything.
“Chest one,” said Ruan. “Chest two. Books. Books. Books.” His finger went down the page. “Chest twelve.” His finger stopped. “Woman. One. And the coat with wings. That’s you. You’re on it.” His finger moved. “And there’s the coat with wings again, under it. That’s your family. Somebody else from your family.” He was quiet. “One.”
“Ruan…”
“I’ve read it all.” He still did not turn round. “I read it all twice. I know my name. I can write it thirty times.” He laid the list down very carefully on the desk, and put the weight back on it. “It isn’t on there.”
She had nothing at all to say. She had known, and she had taught him to read anyway.
Ruan turned round on the stool and looked at her.
“You put your father on,” he said. “Didn’t you. The envoy. Everybody knows the Japan envoy is a Bae. The cook says he’s coming home.” His finger touched the last line. “That one’s new. It’s shinier.”
It was. In the lamplight she could not tell them apart. In the plain white light of the morning, from where she stood in the doorway, with the sun coming across the page at a slant, she could see it at once. The old strokes had gone quiet over two years, as ink does when the glue in it settles. The new ones still held a faint shine, like a word spoken a little too loudly.
He was very calm, and very white. “You put your father on. And you didn’t put me on.”
“It’s not my list.”
“You wrote on it.”
“It’s from two years ago, he wrote it before…”
“You wrote on it.” He stood up. The stool went over behind him. “You could have written anything. You can write like him, you can write like anybody, you wrote my exercise and he didn’t even know. You could have put me on. You could have put me at the bottom with you.” His voice had begun to shake, and he was furious about it. “But you didn’t even think of it. Because you’re like him. You only think about books.”
She opened her mouth.
He snatched the list out from under the weight and ran.
He went past her through the door before she could move, and down the steps, and across the inner court, and she ran after him, but he was faster than she was, he had always been faster, he had legs that were made for running and she had legs that were made for standing on stools. He did not go to the painting hall. He did not go to the stable. He ran straight across the swept court to the women’s quarters, and through the door, and the door banged shut behind him.
Ryeon stopped in the middle of the court.
She stood there in the sun, with her breath tearing in her chest, and nobody looked at her, because she was only the little scribe, standing in the court. After a while she made herself walk back to the library. She righted the stool. She sat down on it. His copybook was still open on the desk. He had been practising cold.
Lady Xiao crossed the court that evening.
Ryeon, standing on the stool, saw her from the east window. She came out of the women’s quarters at dusk in a summer coat of white silk, alone, without a maid. She walked straight across the swept court, very upright, without hurrying, and went in at Yuzhi’s door. In her right hand, held a little away from her, as though it were something that might soil her sleeve, she carried a folded sheet of paper.
She was inside for a long time.
When she came out again her hands were empty. She went back across the court to the women’s quarters as she had come, without looking to either side, and the door closed behind her.
The lamp in Yuzhi’s window burned late.
Ryeon stood at the east window until it went out, and then went on standing there. She pictured the paper in Yuzhi’s hands, under his lamp, on his tidy desk with the brushes in a row. The tenth month of the second year of Tianxian. Twelve chests. Daughter of the Bae house, one.
And under it, in the prince’s hand, her father’s name, written in at the bottom of a list of things a traitor meant to carry to the Tang.
She had written him onto a rope.