Chapter Nine
The Second Sheet
Dongping. Winter, 930
The basket came to the library at dusk on the sixteenth day of the eleventh month, as it always did. The steward set it down inside the door and went away without a word. On the top, by itself, lay a box of black lacquer bound with red cord, and where the cord was knotted, a strip of white paper had been pasted across the knot and stamped with a square red seal she had never seen before, in a style of seal script that was not quite Chinese.
There had been a second box. Ryeon had watched it go past the library window under the steward’s arm, on its way to the painting hall: older lacquer, rubbed brown at the corners, tied with her father’s own cord. It would hold whatever the prince had sent to Japan and Japan had not wanted. That one was not hers to read.
This one was. The prince had said so in the summer. When her father came home, she would read the reply, and nobody else.
She had known it would come since the summer, since Choe Ung’s ship. She had known since the middle of the afternoon, when Hulan came up the library steps two at a time to say that the embassy was at the gate, up from the coast where it had been kept since the seventh month, and the envoy had been taken to the gatehouse, and there were guards on the door. She had spent the rest of the afternoon copying the same four lines of the laments, and when the steward came there were nine copies of them on the desk, and she could not have said what any of them were about.
She still had to sit down.
She sat on the floor with the box on her knees. It was so light that she shook it, very gently, to be sure there was anything inside. Something slid, and stopped.
We shall hear what it says, the prince had said.
She picked up the box, and her brushes, and the bone knife, and went to find Lady Gao.
“A kettle,” said Lady Gao. “A warm room. Steady hands.”
She looked at the box on her writing table, beside the lotus tile, and then at Ryeon.
“You said that to the prince, about the Tang letter. I heard about it. Somebody with a kettle and a warm room.” Her mouth moved slightly. “I wondered at the time whether you meant me.”
“I did,” said Ryeon. “For a while. Then I met Choe Ung’s kettle.”
“Good,” said Lady Gao. “You were right to wonder.”
She stood and drew the curtain across the door of her inner room, and spoke beyond it in Khitan. Ryeon heard Hulan’s voice answer, and then Hulan’s feet going away down the passage to keep watch. Lady Gao came back, and knelt by the brazier, and set the bronze kettle on it, and filled it from the jar.
“Tell me what you need,” she said, in Balhae.
It took most of the night.
The paper seal on the knot came off first. Ryeon held it in the steam from the kettle’s spout, a finger’s breadth away, with Lady Gao holding the box steady, until the paste underneath went soft and grey and the white strip lifted at one corner. She eased it off with the flat of the bone knife, slowly, the whole length of it, without a crease, and laid it face down on a clean board to wait. When it went back it would have to lie exactly over the line of the old paste, not beside it, so that there would be only one line. She knew what two lines meant. She had found them herself.
Inside the box, wrapped in a sheet of blank paper, was the reply of the Council of State of Japan to the King of Dongdan.
It was three sheets of thick creamy paper, pasted end to end into a short scroll, closely written in a clerk’s hand that was neat and small and slightly old-fashioned, as she imagined Japanese clerks must write, having learned their Chinese from books two hundred years old. She read it through twice by the lamp.
The first sheet greeted the King of Dongdan, and set out that his envoy had arrived in Tango in the last month of the previous year, and been examined. The third sheet said that the embassy would therefore not proceed to the capital, and that the envoy had been provisioned and sent home, and gave the date, and the names of the officials of the Council, with the great square seal of the Council of State stamped over the date.
The second sheet was the one.
The envoy Bae Gu gave contrary accounts of his own king. In his later testimony he spoke much of the Khitan king’s crimes. 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.
She sat back on her heels.
That was the rope. Three lines, in a stranger’s small neat hand, under the seal of the Council of State of Japan. Once they had been read aloud in the painting hall there would be no unsaying them, and Lord Yuzhi would send them north.
“Can you change it?” said Lady Gao quietly.
“Not the words.” Ryeon touched the sheet with one finger. “The paper’s too thick and too soft. The ink’s gone right down into it. If I scrape, it’ll show.” Where the second sheet had been pasted to the first, and where the third had been pasted to the second, the seal of the Council had been stamped again, half on one sheet and half on the next, right across the join. “And they’ve sealed the joins. So nobody can take a sheet out and put another one in.”
“Then it can’t be done.”
“It can,” said Ryeon, “if you’re a mender.”
The mounter had taught her on spoiled leaves. Too much water and the blade pushed through; too little and it carried the whole sheet with it. But with some thick papers there was a place the edge would enter, and then, if she kept it almost flat, a thin skin would begin to lift. He had set her to it all one winter, leaf after spoiled leaf, until her hands could find the place without her, and then they took him north.
She tried a corner of the blank wrapping first. Lady Gao held the lamp, and her sleeve fell back from her wrist, and Ryeon looked at the paper instead, as she had been asked to. The first piece came away in wet shreds. On the second she felt the blade find its way, and stopped pressing.
She had never done it on anything that mattered.
So she did not try to change the words. She changed the sheet.
The wrapping was close in colour and thickness to the sheets of the reply; held beside them at the lamp, it let through the same cloudy light. She could not know whether it had come from the same maker. It was what she had, and there was more of it than the box needed. She cut a piece the size of the second sheet from the end that would be folded innermost, and what was left still went round the scroll with a hand’s breadth to spare.
The clerk’s ink was pine soot, matt and faintly blue, like the prince’s. In the summer she had shaved two slivers from the prince’s stick, not one, because the mounter had taught her always to cut two of anything she could not get again, and the second had been waiting in the ink-cake box ever since in a twist of paper. She ground it thin. She had not forgotten the shine Ruan saw. But the clerk’s strokes were five months old, not two years, and still held a little shine of their own. It would have to be enough.
Then, with the clerk’s hand in front of her on the first and third sheets to copy from, every stroke, every little old-fashioned flourish, she wrote a new second sheet.
The envoy Bae Gu gave unclear accounts of the new kingdom, being unable to say in what manner it was the heir of Balhae, with which this court had friendship. This court has no relations with the kingdom of Dongdan and cannot receive its letter.
Every word of it was true, in its way. It was only the dullest possible way of telling the truth.
The half-seals were what she had been afraid of.
With Lady Gao holding the scroll flat and the kettle breathing on the joins, she split the red off the real second sheet. She took only the skin of the paper, a sliver as thin as a fingernail paring, with the half-seal on it, and floated it onto the edge of her new sheet in the place where it had been, and pasted it down with wheat paste so thin it was hardly paste at all, and pressed it under the lotus tile with a fold of silk between.
The first one went down on its line, edge to edge with the half that had stayed behind on the first sheet. She let her breath out.
At the second join the skin tore.
It went with a sound so small that she felt it rather than heard it, up the knife and into her fingers: a corner of red curling up on itself like the edge of a leaf in a fire, and a pale gap where the rest should have been. Lady Gao made no sound at all. The kettle went on breathing.
Ryeon put the knife down.
In for four, she thought. Hold for two. It was Ruan’s way, for the bow, and she had not needed it for herself since the spring. She let the breath go on the out, and looked again.
The vermilion had gone down into the soft paper the way berry juice goes into a kitchen board. Under the torn skin there was more of it, paler, in the same place and the same shape. Nowhere else on the old sheet carried that red. The same place would have to give her a second skin.
She held the old sheet nearer the steam than the mounter would have liked, until it was as soft as cloth, and kept the blade flat with the pads of her first two fingers, close in, where the heat was. She went so slowly that Lady Gao had to trim the lamp twice. Halfway across, Hulan’s feet came back down the passage fast, and they both froze, Ryeon with the knife under a skin of paper so thin she could see the lamp through it. It was only Hulan coming to say that the guard on the inner gate had gone to sleep and was snoring. Lady Gao laughed at that, very quietly, which Ryeon had never heard her do.
The second skin came away whole. It was thinner than the first, and its red a shade paler, the colour of a seal pressed twice without fresh paste. When she laid it on the edge of the new sheet, against the half that had stayed behind on the third, the two halves met, red to red, as they had been stamped.
She pasted the new sheet in between the first and the third, along the old lines of paste, with the joins where they had been. She waited for it to dry. It was nearly morning. She held the whole scroll up to the lamp, and then to the first grey of the window, and turned it, and looked at the joins until her eyes watered. She knew to a hair where to look, and she could not find it.
The old second sheet she folded small, with the three lines on it that would have hanged her father and the torn skin inside it, and held it for a moment. Then she gave it to Lady Gao, who put it in the brazier without a word and stirred the coals over it with the bronze tongs.
They rolled the scroll, and wrapped it, and put it in the box, and tied the red cord in the same knot. Ryeon steamed the paper seal one more time to wake the paste, and laid it exactly over its old line, and pressed it down with the flat of the bone knife, and there was one line of paste under it, and only one.
She sat back on her heels on Lady Gao’s warm floor. Lady Gao took the bone knife out of her fingers, because Ryeon could not open them. The pads of the first two had gone pink and shiny, and when the air touched them they stung.
“You will never tell him,” said Lady Gao.
“Who?”
“Your father.” Lady Gao was looking at the box. “He stood up in front of the court of Japan and told the truth. They will remember it there; they have it in his own hand. But in this country it will only ever be something men say in a harbour. He will be alive. And on every paper that reaches the Emperor, for as long as there is paper, he will be a confused old man who could not explain his own king.”
Ryeon looked at the box.
“I know,” she said.
She read it aloud in the painting hall at the hour of the dragon, in front of the prince and Lord Yuzhi.
She had scrubbed her hands at the kitchen trough first, in water with ice at the edges, and the ink had come out of everything but the creases.
Yuzhi had come in with the morning basket, which he never did. He stood by the brazier in his dark coat with his hands folded inside his sleeves and watched her break the seal. She broke it the ordinary way, with the knife, across the middle, as she would have broken any seal she had never touched before. Then she unrolled the scroll and read it in her voice for sums: the greeting, the arrival, the examination. The second sheet. The third.
When she had finished, nobody said anything. The brazier ticked.
“Unclear,” said the prince, at last. He had his eyes closed. “How very Japanese. They mean he was rude to them and they were rude back. Let me see it.”
She gave it to him. He unrolled it on the table beside the roan, which was still in its meadow, and read it twice, with the eye and then with the hand. His fingertips went down the columns. They went over the second sheet. They went over the join between the second sheet and the third, where the half-seal was, and did not stop.
He rolled it up again and held it out, not to her, but to Yuzhi.
Yuzhi took it to the window. He unrolled it there, in the white light, and read it from the greeting to the date. Then he lifted the first join to the light between his two hands, and looked through it.
Ryeon counted. She could not help it; it was what she did with things she could not stop. One breath. Two. The paper glowed between his hands like a lantern with nothing lit inside it. Seven. Eight. At nine he lowered it, and slid his hands along to the second join, and lifted that.
He looked through it the same way. She put her hands under the table and tried to count, and lost her place, and after that she could only listen: the steward breathing in the doorway, a horse stamping in the yard, and stamping again, and her own heart, which had gone on counting without her and was getting the numbers wrong.
At last he lowered it, and rolled the scroll up.
“The court of Japan has declined the embassy,” he said. “The envoy could not explain his king to them. It is a very dull letter.” He put it under his arm. “I will send it north. The Emperor will be disappointed in the Japanese. He will not be very disappointed in the envoy.” He turned to the prince. “The envoy may be released from the gatehouse to a lodging, Your Highness, pending the Emperor’s pleasure. He will need occupation. I thought perhaps the archive.”
“The archive,” said the prince, with his eyes closed. “By all means.”
Yuzhi bowed and went out without a glance at her. She sat on her stool at the end of the long table with her hands underneath it, pressed together.
The prince opened his eyes. They went past her, and past the roan in its meadow, to the window and the white sky over the wall.
“So,” he said. “The envoy would not kneel.”
That afternoon the prince took the roan off the table.
He rolled it himself, horse and meadow and all, and tied it, and laid it in the chest at the end of the hall where the finished paintings went, though it was not finished. Then he opened the old lacquer box that had come back from Japan, and took out the letter of state in its yellow silk, and under it a roll of heavy southern paper flecked with gold, tied again with the ribbon he had tied it with a year ago. He weighed it in his hand. Then he put it on the side table among the spare brushes, without untying it.
He laid out a clean sheet in the roan’s place, and weighted it at the corners, and stood looking at it.
“Well, reader,” he said, without turning round. “You are still here.”
Her father was not in the gatehouse any more. That had to mean something. She had rehearsed how to say it all through the morning, under her breath, between a horse levy and a complaint about a well. All of it was gone.
“Take my father,” she said.
The prince turned his head.
“You said we would decide when the reply came. He’s in the archive now. He’s only a clerk. He could read for you. You took me.”
“No,” said the prince.
He said it quite gently.
“Your father is not a book,” he said. “Yuzhi can call him a clerk. My brother will not.”
She looked at him. He was looking back at her.
“And he would not come, reader. You know that. You have read him longer than I have.”
She looked down at her hands. The two fingertips had gone shiny, like the inside of a shell.
The prince turned back to his clean sheet and considered it a while longer, as though it might have an opinion.
“I will make you a bargain instead,” he said. “Since you are fond of bargains. I want to write a letter to my son. For when I am gone. You will write it for me.” He picked up a brush, and looked at it, and put it down again. “Take this down.”
He dictated it. It was beautiful. It began with a wild goose that has lost its flock, calling over the reeds at evening, which she recognised from three different poets, and went on through the Book of Songs and the Classic of Filial Piety to a father in a far country who looks north every morning and cannot see so far. It was long. The brush bore down on her sore fingertips at every stroke, so she held it high up the shaft, as he did, which made her columns thin and tall. She wrote the first two and then stopped.
“He can’t read this,” she said.
She had thought of him, this time.
The prince stopped.
“He knows about forty characters, Your Highness. Fifty, maybe. I know which ones. I taught him.” She looked at the two columns. “He won’t be able to read a line of this by himself. He’ll have to take it to somebody. His tutor, or Lord Yuzhi. And they’ll read it to him.”
The prince looked at her, and then at the two columns.
“The emperor in Luoyang,” he said slowly, “has all his letters read to him by his chief minister.” He was quiet. “Tell me the characters he knows.”
So she told him. One, two, three. Heaven, earth, dark, yellow. Cold, come, heat, go. Woman. Book. Chest. Person. Big, small. Mountain. Up, down. Out. Horse, bow. Father, son. Good. Not. And his own name. The prince listened to all of them with his eyes closed, the way he listened to the sums.
Then he took the brush out of her hand, and a clean sheet, and wrote it himself. It took him a long time. He kept stopping, and frowning, and starting again, like a man trying to build a house out of a handful of stones. When he had finished he turned it round and pushed it down the table to her.
阮
父出 子不出
天大 地大
山上一人
好
父
Ruan. Father goes out. Son does not go out. Heaven is big. Earth is big. On the hill, one person. Good. Father.
Sixteen characters. She read them twice.
On the hill, one person. He had left the person standing there, and not said what he was to do. On the third reading she saw Heaven and Earth and Man in it, 天, 地, 人, the three titles the old emperor had given, with the last of them standing on the hill alone.
She looked up. The prince was watching her face.
“Will he be able to read it?” he said.
“Yes,” said Ryeon. “All of it. By himself.”
“Good.” He took the sheet back, and folded it, and sealed it, and wrote nothing on the outside. Then he held it out to her. “You will give it to him. Not now. On the night. You will know which night.” He paused. “And if he cannot see the hill, reader, you will show him.”
She took it, and put it inside her coat.
At his end of the table the prince wetted a broad brush and laid one long grey stroke across the sheet in the roan’s place, very flat, from one edge almost to the other.
By the next morning the grey stroke had become a river.
It was wide and flat and grey, running out at the bottom of the paper to something that might have been the sea, with reeds along the near bank bent over by a wind, and a long way off, small as a seed, a boat with a sail. He painted all morning, with a steadiness she had not seen in him since the decree, and he never said what it was. She read him the basket.
A horse levy. A complaint about the same well. Near the bottom, a bill from Choe Ung in his own dreadful hand, which meant he had not let any clerk see it.
For lacquer, twelve boxes, to be collected at the river gate on the night of the twentieth, by the light of the lantern, against payment in silver.
She read it out in her voice for sums. The prince did not look up from the reeds.
“How very dull,” he said. “Put it with the others.”
She put it with the others. Under it was a return in the hand of Yuzhi’s clerk. Sable pelts, returned from Japan with the embassy, one chest. Condition: bald in places. She read that out as well.
Then a notice from the camp, in a clerk’s copy: a party of the Emperor’s officers would come before the New Year to count the household.
The last paper in the basket was in the secretariat’s big square hand, with Yuzhi’s seal at the foot. It appointed a man with a Balhae name she did not know to be officer of the river gate of the lower town, from this day. It ordered that the grille of the gate was not to be raised between the second drum and the fifth, for any person, boat or goods, except on the written order of the chief minister.
She read it aloud, every word, in the same voice. The prince laid a little more grey along the far bank.
She read it again inside her head. Then she put it with the others, on top of Choe Ung’s bill, and squared the edges.
In the spring Lord Yuzhi had asked her to tell him when. She had said she did not know. She knew now.
Yuzhi sent for her that afternoon.
His office was as cold as ever. The brushes lay on the desk in their row. On the corner stood the dispatch box for the Emperor’s camp, and beside it, on its fold of silk, his seal, with the dish of vermilion and a strip of paper cut to length.
In front of him, laid flat, was a sheet she knew better than her own face. He had weighted it at the corners with four tally sticks.
Daughter of the Bae house. One.
And under it, with its faint shine in the plain light of the afternoon:
裴璆 一
“Lady Xiao brought me this on the second day of the sixth month,” said Yuzhi, “at dusk. She thought it showed that the Balhae women in the prince’s house had been plotting with the envoy before he sailed.” He laid one finger beside the last line, not quite touching it. “She does not read ink well enough to see that this line still shines, and the lines above it have stopped. I do.”
Ryeon stood in front of the desk. It came to the middle of her chest, so that the list lay at the height of her chin.
“I am not going to ask who wrote it,” said Yuzhi. “It is in the prince’s hand. It is on the prince’s list of what he means to take to the Tang. And it is the name of an envoy whose embassy has failed. If the Emperor’s officers ever see this sheet, Lady Bae, they will not ask who wrote the last line. They will hang the man it names.”
She said nothing.
“So I will tell you what I am going to do with it. I am going to keep it. In my case, with the copy I made the week it was written.” He folded his hands. “And you are going to stay.”
She looked up.
“When the prince goes,” said Yuzhi, “he will take twelve chests. Books, brushes, ink. Lady Gao. His inkstone, and his seals.” His voice was perfectly level: the voice he used for millet. “He will not take you. You will stay in Dongdan, and read for me. Your father will work in the archive, and keep his head, and grow old. You may even see him, now and then, across the court. And this sheet will stay in my case.” He paused. “Until the prince goes, you will not go near him.”
“Near…”
“Your father. Not once. Lady Xiao has told the women’s quarters that the Balhae women were plotting with the envoy. Fourteen women, by my count, and their maids. If you are seen within a hundred paces of him, she is right.”
He moved the tally stick at the near corner, very slightly, so that it lay square with the edge.
“And you will tell me when.”
She thought of Choe Ung’s bill, lying under the appointment in the painting hall with its edges squared, and kept her face exactly as it was.
“And if I go?” she said.
“Then you will be at sea,” said Yuzhi, “and your father will not.” He picked up his brush, and went back to his line.
She found Hulan in the kitchen yard at dusk, sitting on the woodpile in the last of the sun, eating an apple.
“He’s going,” said Ryeon. There was nobody else in the yard but a hen. “The prince. Soon. Lady Gao’s going with him.”
“I know that,” said Hulan. She went on eating the apple. “Everybody knows that. The geese know that.”
“Come too.”
Hulan stopped eating.
“Lady Gao would take you if I asked her,” said Ryeon. “She’ll need a maid. Somebody who knows how she likes things. You could go with her, to the South, and…”
“And what?” said Hulan. She put the apple down on the woodpile beside her. “And talk to who? I can’t speak Chinese. I can’t read. Southerners eat dogs, my aunt says, and they’ve got no grass, and it rains all the time. What would I do there? Sit in a room in a Southern city and be Lady Gao’s parrot?” She shook her head. “Choe Ung’s already got a parrot. No.”
The hen had come over to see about the apple. Hulan moved it out of reach without looking.
“But if you stay…”
“If I stay I’ll go home to the steppe one day, where I come from, with my brother, and my aunt, who is always right, and the horses.” She looked at Ryeon steadily with her round, frank face. “You’re going, aren’t you. You’ve got that look. Like when you count the windows.”
Ryeon looked at the stable roof, where the last of the sun was.
“You’re a book,” said Hulan. “You told the young lord so in the winter, and he told my brother, and my brother told me. Everybody tells my brother things.” She put her hand inside her coat and took out a scrap of paper, folded small and soft with handling, and unfolded it, and held it up between them. 忽蘭. The heart at the bottom. The orchid with grass on its head.
“I’m not a book,” said Hulan. “I’m a sudden orchid. You said.” She folded it up again and put it away. “Orchids don’t travel. You put them in a pot and take them somewhere new and they just die. Everybody knows that.”
She picked up the apple again, and took a bite, and chewed, looking at the sun going down behind the stable.
“Anyway,” she said, with her mouth full, “somebody has to stay and let the geese out.”
When the house was dark she took the lamp, with its shutter half closed, and went across the court to the painting hall, and in by the fourth window, which still lifted out of its groove.
The river lay on the long table where the roan had been, grey in the lamplight, with its little boat. The papers from the morning were where she had squared them. In the waste basket by the cabinet, under the spoiled brushes, was the stack of the summer’s returns that the steward kept for burning at the New Year. She went through it on her knees until she found the one from the river wharf. Parched millet for a journey, forty baskets. Yuzhi’s small square seal at the foot, in red.
She laid it on the floor. Beside it she laid Choe Ung’s bill, and beside that the appointment, in a row, as straight as Lord Yuzhi’s brushes. Then she sat down among the prince’s horses with the lamp beside her, and read them the way Lord Yuzhi read a grain return.
Once for the total.
The boats would go through the river gate on the night of the twentieth, and the grille would not go up at night without Lord Yuzhi’s written order. He had sealed this return in the summer, and turned it face down, and asked her about pitch. He had kept his own copy of the list, with eleven chests on it, for two years, and never sent it north. He wanted the prince to go. The gate would open.
Then once for the theft.
But not on his own paper. When the Emperor asked how the King of Dongdan had got through a gate that needed the chief minister’s order, Lord Yuzhi would show him an order with his name at the foot in somebody else’s hand. And when the Emperor asked whose, Lord Yuzhi had a sheet in his case with one Balhae name on it.
Whoever made the pass, it would be her father’s. Unless she stayed.
For a little while she let it be a whole day. She would carry a register across the court. Her father would look up when she came in. There would be water beside his knee, and no hurry, because tomorrow she could bring another register.
And one day a merchant would come back from Goryeo with more word of the Yang woman and the boy, and the word would come to this house, and Lord Yuzhi would read it first, at his window, twice. Then he would put it in a pigeonhole with a tag she could not read, and tell her what was in it. Or not. She would be like the emperor in Luoyang, having her letters read to her.
She had been waiting for three years. She had made herself so useful that nobody locked the door, and then she had sat inside it like a book on a shelf and waited for somebody to come and take her down. She had sent her father a poem asking him to come and get her, and he had read a heart. The prince had said he would not come, gently, as he said things about horses. Lord Yuzhi had said it as if it were millet.
It was not fair. She said so, out loud, to forty-one horses. None of them argued.
Above her, on the long table, the river ran out to the edge of the paper. The little boat sat in the middle of it, small as a seed, with nobody in it.
Then somebody would have to go, and it would have to be her.
She looked at the three papers in their row. If the pass was going to hang somebody, it had better hang somebody they could not reach. She would make it herself. She would write down that she had made it, and the line on the list as well, in her own hand, with her own name at the bottom, and she would be on a boat when anybody read it. Lord Yuzhi would want a paper like that very much.
She knew what she would ask him for it.
One of her feet had gone to sleep among the horses, and it was still prickling when she reached the library with the wharf return; the bill and the appointment she had squared back into the pile. She laid the wharf return beside the lamp, and trimmed the wick, and took a sheet of good paper, and ground the ink, and sat with the brush in her hand.
It was the first thing she had written since Sanggyeong that was meant to be kept and read as hers. Everything else had been in the library hand, which belonged to nobody, or in somebody else’s. She had a hundred hands.
She found that she had forgotten what her own looked like. She had to stop, and write three characters on a scrap, 草車道, and look at them, to remember.
It was smaller than she had thought. Rounder. It leaned forward, slightly, at the tops of the long strokes, as though it were always going into a wind.
She wrote:
I, Bae Ryeon, scribe of the library of the King of Dongdan, born in Sanggyeong in the year of the earth-hare, state that in the sixth month of this year I wrote the two characters of my father’s name, and the number one, at the foot of the twelfth chest in the King’s register of the second year of Tianxian, in imitation of the King’s hand. The King did not know of it. My father, the envoy Bae Gu, did not know of it, and has not spoken with me since the fall of Sanggyeong. No one of the household of Lady Gao knew of it, nor any servant of hers. I did it alone, because I wished to take my father with me. I also made a pass in the hand of the chief minister Yelü Yuzhi, using a seal taken from a grain return, for my departure by the river gate with the King. My father had no part in that work.
She read it through twice. Nearly all of it was true. The last part had not happened yet.
At the bottom, she wrote her name.
裴蓮
A coat with wings. Grass, cart, road.
Then she took the ink-cake box out from under the floor behind the eleventh shelf. Yuzhi’s tally tag lay on top, North granary. Millet. Fourth bay, and under it the others she had picked out of his waste basket since, one at a time, whenever she passed his desk with a safe poem: a spoiled label, a torn receipt, half a list of brushes. Nine of them now. She laid them out on the floor in a row, and began, slowly, on a second sheet.
Pass by the river gate this night the bearer and those with him, with goods, on the business of the King’s household. By order. Yuzhi.
It looked easy. That was the trouble with it. Every stroke had to be finished, all the way to the top button, and her sore fingers made her hold the brush high, the prince’s way, which was not Lord Yuzhi’s way at all. It took four sheets. The first three went into the lamp. On the fourth went the seal: the red square from the wharf return, lifted off with the bone knife in a skin of paper so thin the lamp showed through it, and pasted at the foot. Forty baskets of parched millet. That seemed right.
When it was dry she held it up to the lamp.
Then she put Yuzhi’s tags back in the ink-cake box, and the scrap with her own three characters at the bottom of them, and the box back under the board.
The confession lay on the desk under its weight, drying. In the last of the lamplight every long stroke on it leaned the same way, toward the door.