Epilogue
Laments
Dongping. Winter, 930–931
The Emperor’s officers had come early, and in the morning they found the King of Dongdan gone, and wrote it down.
They wrote down a great deal. They wrote down that the King had fled by sea to the Tang with forty persons and twelve chests of books, and that he had left behind him a carved post on the shore at the mouth of the Liao bearing a verse in which he confessed himself beaten and ashamed. They wrote down that the gate officer of the river gate had been deceived by a forged pass bearing the chief minister’s seal, and had been flogged and dismissed. They wrote down that the chief minister had been at the north granary, checking tallies, on the night in question. And they wrote down that the King’s library, or what remained of it, was to be catalogued for the Emperor, so that it could be determined what the King had taken and what he had left.
Yuzhi gave the cataloguing to the envoy Bae Gu. He brought the officers’ record himself, because the catalogue was to be made against it, and put it into Bae Gu’s hands, and waited in the doorway in his dark coat while Bae Gu read it.
Near the end, between the gate officer and the north granary, the officers had written down the forger: a Balhae child of the King’s household, who had fled with him. She had confessed that she had written the envoy’s own name into the King’s register, in the King’s hand, so that the envoy might be taken south; that she had made the pass; that she had tampered, the year before, with the chief minister’s dispatch to the Emperor’s camp; and that the envoy had known nothing. The confession was signed, and the chief minister held it.
Bae Gu read it to the end. Then he rolled it up and tried twice to tie the cord. Yuzhi took it from him, and tied it, and gave it back, and folded his hands in his sleeves.
“You will find it dull,” he said. “Mostly. Anthologies. Histories. A great many grain returns.” He looked at the shelves for a moment. “A man who is useful does not hang. I need you useful, sir, for some time.”
Bae Gu bowed. Yuzhi went away.
It took him the whole of the winter.
The library had never been allowed a fire, because of the books, and the floor was boards laid over cold earth, with no flues under it. He worked in his coat and his outer coat and a pair of felt boots that Yuzhi had sent without comment, and his breath smoked over the pages, and his ink froze in the stone if he left it for the length of a meal. He did not mind. He had catalogued colder rooms, in his youth, in the archives of the old capital, before he had been anybody.
He found her on the first day.
He found her on the labels of the shelves. They were in the plain upright library hand the scribes were trained to, which belonged to nobody: Histories. Poetry, Tang. Poetry, before Tang. Ritual. But at the tops of the long strokes the brush had leaned forward, a hair’s breadth, as though into a wind, and he had taught that lean to a five-year-old on a warm floor and would have known it anywhere. He found her in the index of the king’s own book of verse, which listed the poems by subject, Horses, Snow, Partings, Birds, in the same hand. He found her in the margins of the grain returns, in tiny careful figures, where somebody had checked the sums and found them wrong. He thought he found her, too, in the archive copies of a year of letters, in a dozen hands that were not hers; but he could not have said why, and he left it out of the catalogue.
She had been everywhere in this room for two years and more. She had been in every book. And not once, anywhere in this room, had she written her name.
He catalogued it all, slowly, a shelf at a time, and wrote it down.
Among the grain returns from the north, tied in with them by somebody who had not known where else to put it, was a petition to the king for seed grain from the headman of a Balhae village on the steppe. It was in the hand of a man who had learned his characters late, and it ended with his name and nineteen finger-joint marks. The form for such a thing was petitions, various. Bae Gu read the name, which took him some time, and entered the petition under it: Petition of Jang Mun, headman of Willow Ford, for seed grain; with the marks of nineteen households.
In the third week, behind the eleventh shelf, a board moved under his knee. Under it was a box that had once held a cake of ink. In the box were scraps of other people’s handwriting: a tally of lamp oil in a terrible hand; a torn corner of one of the king’s book lists; a child’s copying exercise with a horse that had five legs; a note about thread; nine strips and scraps in the small square hand of the chief minister. And at the bottom, by itself, a scrap with three characters on it, 草車道, in a hand he had not seen on paper since Sanggyeong. It leaned forward at the tops of its long strokes. It was a practice line, the sort a scribe writes to remember how her brush sits.
He catalogued the box as waste paper, various. Then he put the last scrap inside his coat. It was the only thing he ever took out of that library, and he decided, after some thought, that it had been addressed to him.
The Wen Xuan was on the seventh shelf, by the third door: an old copy in thirty scrolls, much water-stained, so that half of it had to be guessed. He came to it in the first month, when the snow was at its deepest, and took the scrolls to the reading desk under the window, and unrolled each one far enough to see what it held and how far the water had got in, and wrote that down, and rolled it up again, and took the next.
Halfway through, he came to the laments. A hand’s width in, rolled up with them, was a sheet of other paper, smaller than the scroll, that had lain there so long it had taken the same curl. He weighted it open with his inkstone and the water dropper.
Four columns. Twenty characters. A state poem, in the library hand, as plain as a grain return. But the hand that made it had been ten years old, and he had taught it, and at the tops of the long strokes it leaned.
草衰遼水北
車轉海門東
道遠孤帆影
存心一寸紅
On the head of the first column, a small grey whorl, the ridges of a fingertip in a painter’s wash. On the head of the second, another. And on the head of the third, over the character for road, a round black blot the size of a child’s thumbnail, with a grey halo where the ink had crept into the fibres, so that the road was gone.
He sat for a long time with it under the window.
He read it the way he had taught her to read, as pictures first and words after. He read the heads of the lines. He read the last line, keep in your heart one inch of red, which he had read as a heart, in the rain, in Tango.
He read it as a lotus bud this time. An inch high, on the palace ponds, in summer, from the rail of a bridge, with a small weight on his arm leaning out to count.
They had lost count somewhere after forty. He had forgotten that. She had not.
He did not take the sheet out of the library. He kept it the way a cataloguer keeps things: he wrote it into the catalogue, Wen Xuan, thirty scrolls, water-damaged; with one loose sheet, verse, rolled in the laments, where it would be kept for as long as there was a catalogue. He rolled it up in the laments where he had found it, and put the scroll back with the other twenty-nine on the seventh shelf by the third door, where he could see it from the desk.
Then, because it was very late, and there was no one in the library, and the snow had stopped, he did the thing he had done in Sanggyeong, long ago, and on the boards of a guesthouse in the rain, and once more, in the archive, with a guard at the door and a register of the Dragon Spring district open between them.
He took the water dropper from the desk, and his brush, and lowered himself down onto his bad knees on the cold boards of the library floor, and wrote her name.
蓮
Grass. A cart, carrying it. A road underneath, running out to the right like a road leaving a village.
He knelt there and waited for it to go.
It did not go.
The floor was too cold, and the night had come down hard outside the paper windows. He watched the water lie on the boards, dark and wet, and not sink in, because the wood was frozen hard, and not shrink at the edges. He watched a skin come over it, very slowly, from the outside in, the grass first and then the cart and then the long stroke of the road, until the whole character lay on the floor of the library in a thin pale shine of ice.
It stayed.
He knelt beside it for a long time, an old man in two coats on a cold floor, and kept his hands from it.
In the morning, when he came in, it was still there.
The boy was standing over it.
He was ten or so, Khitan, with his crown shaved and two long locks at his temples, in a good coat that he had already grown out of at the wrists. He had a copybook under one arm. He was standing very still in the middle of the library floor in the grey early light, looking down at the character in the ice, with his lips moving.
He looked up when Bae Gu came in. He did not seem surprised to see him, or frightened. He looked, if anything, a little cross, and very determined.
“That’s her name,” he said. “Lotus. It’s grass, and a cart, and a road.” He pointed at it, carefully, not touching. “She showed me.”
“Yes,” said Bae Gu.
The boy looked at him with his chin up, as if he were deciding something.
“I can read fifty-two characters,” he said. “She taught me. Before she went.” He held out the copybook. “Nobody else will teach me properly. They just hit my hand. She said you taught her. On a floor.” He looked at the ice, and then back at Bae Gu. “Can you teach me the rest?”
Bae Gu looked at the boy, and at the copybook held out to him in both hands, too tightly. He looked at the character on the floor between them.
“Yes,” he said. “Sit down.”
