Chapter Eight
What Wu Taibo Did Next
Dongping. Summer, 930
The prince wanted his register.
He asked for it the next morning, before the basket, before she had climbed onto the stool. Ryeon kept her hands on the edge of the table.
“Lord Yuzhi has it, Your Highness.”
The prince waited.
“The young lord took it to his mother. She took it to Lord Yuzhi.”
“From you.”
“Yes.”
He looked down the hall at the tables, then at the roan in front of him, still lying in its meadow with its legs in the air.
“What did you do to it?”
She had meant to say that Ruan had been angry. It would have been true. She could have told him about the open copybook, and the lesson, and Lady Xiao crossing the court. All true, and all the way round the thing he had asked.
“I put my father on it.”
The prince laid his hand on the table, palm down. She watched the fingers.
“In whose writing?”
“Yours.”
For a moment there was only the sound of a fly at the high window. The prince turned his hand over.
“Show me.”
She climbed onto the stool. The ink in the stone was dry, and she had to pour water and grind, while he watched. The stick squeaked on the stone. It never squeaked for her. When the ink was ready she wrote her father’s name on a clean sheet, and the number one after it, and laid the brush across the stone.
He drew the sheet toward him. His thumb covered the name. It was a large thumb; he could cover both characters with it.
She knew what he had done to a forger’s hand.
Then he reached across the table and took her right hand.
He turned it palm up to the window and looked at her fingers: the ink in the creases of the first two, the hard place on the side of the second where the brush lay, the grey under the nails that never came out, whatever she scrubbed them with. He looked at them the way he looked at an inkstone a dealer had brought him, tilting it to the light. He kept hold of her hand for three breaths, perhaps four. Then he let it go.
“You could have asked,” he said.
“Would you have taken him?”
The prince looked up.
She had not meant to ask it like that. She put the hand he had held into her lap, under the other one, before he could see it shaking.
He took his thumb away. The ink was still wet. It had left part of the name on his skin.
She looked at the name. The number beside it was so small.
The prince picked up the sheet by one corner. There was a little brazier at his elbow, where the steward kept a kettle warm for his tea even in summer, and he held the corner down among the coals until it caught, and let it fall, and it was gone.
Ryeon took her hands out of her lap and put them flat on the table. “Then tell Lord Yuzhi I wrote it.”
“He can see that.”
“But if he knows…”
“He can read, reader. You must stop supposing that makes people helpful.”
He glanced at his thumb, where the name had dried in the whorls, and left it.
“Your father is still in Japan. When he comes home, he will bring a reply. We shall hear what it says before we decide what to do with him.” He reached for the basket. “You will read the reply from Japan. Bring it to me at the morning reading. I will have no one else telling me what your father has said.”
That was all. He gave her the first paper from the basket, a dispute about oats, and held it out until she took it.
On the fifteenth she took Yuzhi her safe poem. There was no pitch in it, nor anything else that floated.
The prince did not paint. A fly walked across the roan, and he let it. The grey kitten caught its first mouse in the stable and left it in one of the young lord’s boots.
It had taken her three drafts to make it that dull. Yuzhi read it twice, standing at his window, and put it in the pigeonhole with the Khitan tag, and said nothing. She would have liked him to ask her about pitch.
Ruan stopped coming to lessons. In the mornings she heard arrows going into straw in the archery yard, one after another, faster than anybody could aim them, and sometimes his tutor’s voice, and sometimes nobody’s. She saw him once, crossing the court with the grey kitten’s head sticking out of the front of his coat, and he went the long way, round by the well, so as not to pass the library steps. His copybook lay open on her desk where he had left it, at cold. She dusted round it.
In the painting hall the prince’s thumb was clean. He said Again at a wrong figure, and Tell Yuzhi, and nothing else, and when she handed him a paper she held it by the very corner.
The Emperor’s riders were on the roads that summer. They came into the court in twos and threes with the dust of the north on their boots, and went in at Yuzhi’s door, and rode away. While they were on the roads the prince’s ship stayed at its mooring with its new mast, and the prince stayed at his table.
“My aunt says they aren’t looking for anything,” said Hulan, at the kitchen door, counting them out of the gate. “She says that’s the kind you watch.”
“What do they look like when they are looking for something?”
Hulan considered. “Like Lord Yuzhi,” she said.
One afternoon the steward brought one of them up the library steps and pointed at her. Ryeon got down off the stool and counted the ways out of the room, as if there might be a twelfth by now. The rider held out a letter. It was from his mother, in a village clerk’s bad Chinese, and it was about a cow. Ryeon read it to him twice, the second time slowly, and he gave her a dried apricot and went away.
All that summer she went to the library window whenever she heard horses in the court. Choe Ung had said late summer, or early autumn. Most of the horses were the Emperor’s. Once it was only the steward’s brother-in-law with a cart of charcoal, and she could have kissed his mule. Every foreign packet went to Yuzhi’s office. She watched the men carry them in, and waited for one to come out.
On the first of the eighth month her poem said only: The prince did not paint. It rained on the twelfth. When she brought it, the dispatch box stood open in the middle of Yuzhi’s desk, and beside it, on its fold of silk, lay his seal, with the dish of vermilion and a strip of paper cut to length, as on the day of the geese. He read her poem twice, and filed it, and said nothing. At dusk, from the stool at the east window, she watched a rider carry the box across the court to the gate under his arm. From there she could not tell how heavy it was.
The old east coast. Autumn, 930 (Bae Gu)
They came ashore on the twentieth day of the seventh month, in the bay below the Dragon Plain where Balhae’s ships had always put in, with every man aboard sick.
An officer was waiting for them on the beach. He had a written order with Yuzhi’s seal on it, and he read it out in Khitan and then again in Chinese, in case the envoy’s Khitan had grown rusty abroad. The embassy, having returned from a court that had declined to receive it, would remain at the coast pending examination of the documents it carried.
Bae Gu, who was standing on the first thing since Tango that did not move under him, asked when the examination would be.
The officer said that he had not been told.
They were lodged in a salt-store above the beach. The salt-makers had been told to leave it, and had left. The salt had not been told anything, and stayed, and got into everything: the bedding, the rice, the men’s hair, the seams of the envoy’s good coat, and the chest of sables, which had come through a Japanese spring only to be cured all over again, like fish.
Nobody came to examine the documents. Early in the eighth month Bae Gu offered the box to the officer, to save everybody trouble, and the officer put his hands behind his back as if it were hot. So the Council’s box stood on a sack at the head of Bae Gu’s bedding. On about the fortieth evening it occurred to him that a sensible man had now been given a whole season in which to have an accident with a lamp. He considered this as a matter of professional interest, and went to sleep with the box where it was. Each morning he looked at the paper strip across the knot, to see whether the damp had lifted it. It held.
His own box, which was pending nothing, contained the letter of state that no emperor had read and, under it, the king’s poem. Some evenings, when the light was good, he took the poem out and read it, and put it back.
Dongping. Autumn, 930
In the ninth month the wild geese went over the court, south, in long untidy lines, talking all the way. The autumn returns came in. Nobody could have called it early autumn any more.
Ruan came into the painting hall one afternoon, in the middle of the millet.
He came in by the door, without knocking, without being sent for, past the steward, who opened his mouth and then shut it again. Ryeon was on her stool at the end of the table with the basket. The prince was sitting where he always sat now, with his hands folded and the dry brush across the mountains. Ruan walked the length of the hall, between the tables, past the forty-one horses, without looking at any of them, and stopped in front of his father.
He had grown since the spring. Ryeon had not noticed until now, seeing him stand there. His wrists came out of the sleeves of his coat.
“I read the list,” Ruan said.
The prince kept his hands folded.
“I can read now,” said Ruan. “Some. She taught me.” He did not look at Ryeon. “I read the list of what you’re taking. The chests. I read it twice. I know my name. It isn’t on it.” His voice held. He had, Ryeon understood, practised this, perhaps for weeks, perhaps in the stall with the dun pony. “Why not?”
The prince was quiet for so long that Ryeon thought he would not answer. Then he unfolded his hands.
“Do you remember,” he said, “the story of Wu Taibo?”
“No,” said Ruan. “I don’t care about Wu Taibo.”
“No. You wouldn’t.” The prince almost smiled. “I have been asking everyone in this house, for a year, what he did after he went south.” He looked at his own hands. “The histories give his kingdom to the brother who went with him. No son.”
Ruan waited, with his jaw set.
“I know now,” said the prince. “He had no son with him. That is what he did next.” He looked up at Ruan.
“I don’t care what he did. I want to come with you.”
“I know.”
“You took her.” Ruan’s voice cracked, finally, and he went on. “You took a Balhae girl you never even talked to. You put her on the list. You took your books.”
“Yes,” said the prince. “A book can go anywhere, and be the same book. You can’t.” He leaned toward his son. “I am leaving you where you can be found.”
Ruan stood there.
The prince reached down beside his stool, to a flat lacquer case that Ryeon had never seen him open, and took out a small painting, and laid it on the table in front of his son.
It was the dun pony. Dusk, with his lower lip hanging and his eyes half shut, standing four-square in the grass, and on his back, holding the reins too tightly in both fists, the boy in the Khitan coat with his hair shaved at the crown and two locks at his temples.
The boy had a face now.
He was not looking at the painter. He was looking past him, off the edge of the paper, at something nobody else in the picture could see. His chin was up. He looked a little cross, and very determined, and exactly like Ruan.
Ruan looked at it and stood quite still. On her stool, Ryeon found she was counting for him: in for four, hold for two.
“You always looked away when you saw the brush,” said the prince.
Ruan picked the painting up in both hands. He did not say anything at all. He turned round and walked back down the length of the hall, between the tables, past the forty-one horses, holding the painting in front of him so carefully that he seemed to have stopped breathing, and went out of the door.
He had not looked at Ryeon once.
The old east coast, and the road to Dongping. Autumn into winter, 930 (Bae Gu)
On the coast the weather was beautiful. Day after day the sea lay flat and blue under a high, clean sky, with a little wind from the south that would have carried a ship anywhere it liked, and the embassy of Dongdan sat in a salt-store and looked at it. He would have preferred rain. Rain would at least have shown some fellow feeling. Every few days the men carried the sables down and laid them out on the rocks to air, in rows, bald side up, like a catch that somebody had thrown back.
Bae Gu composed a good deal of poetry that autumn and wrote none of it down, having lately learned what writing things down could do.
Twice the Emperor’s riders came along the coast road, and stopped, and counted the embassy, and the chests, and rode away north without a word to him. A minister who holds a returning embassy at the coast while the Emperor’s riders are on the roads wishes, as a rule, to have its box opened in a quiet house; and Bae Gu had served ministers long enough to admire the tidiness of it, even from inside the salt.
By the ninth month the salt-makers had waited long enough, and came up the beach in a body to ask, very politely, when they might have their store back. They went away, and came back with a basket of crabs, which he took to be a petition, and granted.
In the tenth month there was frost on the salt in the mornings, which was hard to tell from the salt, and the Emperor’s riders stopped coming. Late in the month a second paper came from the west under the same seal. The embassy might proceed to Dongping. The examination would take place there. The salt-makers had their store back by noon.
They rode west for eighteen days, over the mountains and down onto the plain east of the Liao, through country Bae Gu no longer recognised.
It was not that it had changed. The hills were the same hills, and the fields lay cut and grey under the morning frost, as they had every early winter of his life. It was that every village they passed had somebody else in it. Khitan herdsmen grazed their flocks on the stubble of fields that Balhae farmers had cleared. Once, at a ford with ice along its edges, he saw a line of carts going north with Balhae families on them, a hundred or more, with Khitan riders at either end, and a girl of about ten on the tailboard of the last cart, looking back at the river. He watched her until the road turned.
On the last afternoon they came down to the river below the walls, where Balhae people from the lower town had built their sheds along the bank. Children ran beside the horses for a while, shouting in Malgal. An old woman at a cooking fire called something after them in the speech of the capital, which he had not heard in a woman’s voice since Sanggyeong, and by the time he had turned in the saddle to catch it they were at the gate.
It was the afternoon of the sixteenth day of the eleventh month. The officer of the gate was waiting for them. He was courteous. He had another order under Yuzhi’s seal. He did not trouble to read it aloud; by now it could only say what the others had said. The envoy would be lodged in the gatehouse. The documents would be taken up to the king’s house at once.
Bae Gu gave him the lacquer box with the red cord, its paper strip still whole across the knot. Then, because the officer’s hand was still out, he gave him his own box as well. He minded the second more than the first.
“Who will read it?” he asked.
The officer looked surprised to be asked. “The king’s reader, sir.”
“And who is the king’s reader?”
“A child, sir.” The officer shrugged. “A Balhae child. The king likes her voice.”
Bae Gu stood in the gateway for a moment after the officer had gone, with the dust of the road on him and his hands empty. Then he followed the guard to the gatehouse, and sat down on the bench there, and looked at the wall.