Prologue
Tango Province, Japan. Spring, 930
It had rained for nine days, and the guesthouse by the lagoon had begun to smell like the inside of a ship.
Bae Gu had long since ceased to notice. He had crossed the sea in the last month of the old year with ninety-three men, a letter of state and a chest of sable pelts for the Emperor of Japan, and three months later every part of that embassy remained where it had come ashore. The men were quartered in borrowed buildings between the water and the hill, where they ate the province’s rice and played interminable games of go. The letter lay in its lacquer box. And the sables, into which the damp had found its way, had begun, quietly, to go bald.
He considered this a fair comment on the embassy, and more tactfully expressed than anything he could have managed himself.
The summons to the capital had not come. What came instead, every few days, was the examiner. For two hundred years the kingdom of Balhae had sent its embassies across this sea, and Fujiwara no Masakazu had been sent down from the capital to ask why this one arrived under a new name, Dongdan. He asked in the same mild voice each time, his brush poised above the same sheet of paper, as though the answer might change if only he waited long enough. Ten years earlier the two of them had sat up past the third watch in the guest hall of the capital, matching couplets until the lamps burned out and somebody’s servant fell asleep against a pillar. Now Masakazu addressed most of his questions to the paper, and Bae Gu, who had been a diplomat for thirty years, did not hold it against him.
Dongdan is the heir of Balhae. Its king sends his greetings to the Emperor of Japan.
He had said it so often that it had stopped being a lie. It had become weather.
That night, there being nothing else left to do, he opened the lacquer box.
The letter of state lay on top in its wrapping of yellow silk. Beneath it was the poem his new king had sent for presentation at court, copied out in the king’s own fine hand. Bae Gu had carried it across the sea without unrolling it. As a young man he would have read it before the ship cleared harbour, as one reads a rival’s verse, in search of the weak line. But no banquet had arisen to require it, and he had found in himself no wish to learn what Balhae sounded like in the mouth of the house that had burned it.
He read it now by the light of the one lamp.
Four lines of five characters. The tones were correct and the rhyme was clean, east answering red. A traveller’s poem, all withered grass and turning carts and a single sail going out to sea: the sort of thing any competent clerk might produce in an afternoon, and a Japanese courtier would praise for its restraint. He was rolling it closed when his eye, which had spent forty years looking for the hinge in other men’s verse, caught on the tops of the four columns.
草 車 道 存
He sat very still.
Then he laid the scroll on the floor, as carefully as if it held water, and did a thing he had not done in five years. He wet the tip of his brush in the rain that had pooled on the windowsill, lowered himself onto his bad knees, and began to write on the boards in water, slowly, as he had once guided a much smaller hand.
Masakazu came in the middle of the morning, shaking the rain from his sleeves, and settled across from him with his papers.
“Shall we resume where we stopped?” he said. “The kingdom of Dongdan. Its founding, and its king.”
Bae Gu looked at the floorboards between them. The water had long since dried. Nothing remained there but the grain of the wood.
“There is no kingdom of Dongdan,” he said.
Masakazu’s brush stayed where it was, a finger’s breadth above the paper.
“There was Balhae. Four winters ago the Khitan came over the snow, and in the first month the capital opened its gates, and Balhae ended. What stands there now is a garrison with a name painted on its gate. The men who sent me here are the men who burned my city.” His voice was quite steady, and a little hoarse. “My wife and my children were scattered when it fell. I do not know where any of them are.”
For a long while there was no sound but the rain. Then Masakazu laid his brush on its rest, unused, and folded his hands, and when he spoke again it was in the voice one uses at a sickbed.
“You understand what you have said. You are the envoy of a king. You have told the court of Japan that your king is a usurper and his kingdom does not exist.”
“I understand it.”
“For three months you have given me the same answer. Why change it today?”
Bae Gu looked down at the floorboards, where there was nothing at all, and did not tell him.