Chapter Two
The Third Gate of Liquan
The dawn drum sounded at the fifth watch and Yongchong's gate-bar lifted with a sound she had heard, in eighteen months, in too many shapes of mood. This morning it sounded like a thing she was permitted to do.
She had not slept. She had lain on her bed in her travelling coat and counted, by old habit, the timbers in her ceiling, and then the names her husband had written on the only letter she would not read, and then — when the counting had begun to be a kind of prayer she had not given permission for — the wards between her house and the Western Market, west and a little north, twelve of them, each with its own gate and its own bar and its own guardsman to be civil to. She had risen at the fourth watch and put on her grey.
Daoist grey was not, by the Tang Code, a vestment. It was a colour. She had argued the distinction once in front of her father, at thirteen, in a small private way that had made him laugh. Tang law could prohibit a robe; it could not yet prohibit a shade. A widow who chose the grey of un-fired clay was within the law and outside the immediate notice of any clerk likely to be at his desk before the dawn drum. She had two of these robes. She had brushed the better one twice last night, while the lamp burned.
In the courtyard Nanny Zhou stood at the kitchen door with a bowl of millet she would not, this morning, have argued about. Wanjun ate four spoonfuls standing. She was not hungry. She would be more useless on an empty stomach than on a full one.
"Mistress."
"Nanny."
"The mare or the gelding."
"The mare."
"The mare is in season."
"The mare is the slower of the two and will not bolt at a Sogdian camel. Saddle the mare."
Nanny Zhou's mouth made the small shape it made when she had been overruled on a point of horseflesh. She had been right about horseflesh, in eighteen months, every time. She went and woke the boy at the back stall.
The mare was named Spring Snow because she had been bought in a year when the snow had come twice. She was eleven, narrow-chested, and afraid of pigeons. Wanjun was bad with horses; she had said so to her father at six, and her father had agreed, gravely, and had not made her good at horses. Spring Snow was the horse she was bad at most kindly. The boy gave her a leg up and she settled in the saddle without grace and arranged the grey skirts of her robe over the horse's flank in the divided way her father had had a tailor cut for her at twelve, so that she could be a magistrate's daughter on a horse and not a country girl in a wagon.
She rode out at the fifth section of the dawn drum.
The avenue west of Yongchong was pale grey and empty. The light had not yet committed itself. The shops along the great avenue had not opened their shutters; the avenue itself, which by mid-morning would be full of carts and water-sellers and Sogdian camel-trains, was a long swept length of beaten earth holding the small mist of the river. A water-seller passed her going east, his pole creaking, his eyes flat with the night he had not slept either. A Gold Bird patrol passed her going west — four men, the small lacquered crest on the leader's cap — and the leader looked at her, registered the grey, did not slow. A woman alone on horseback at this hour was just legal; a woman alone in Daoist grey was almost a credential. The captain raised two fingers in the salutation a junior censor would give to a clerk he was not sure of. She returned it with the bend of her head she used for officers of equivalent uncertainty.
She passed the corner where the back lane of her own ward met the avenue and did not look down it. She had registered, last night, the small dry sound of the man who had been waiting in her drain. The man had been gone before the fourth watch — she had listened to him go; he had walked east on the dirt of the back lane and then north on the dirt of the long alley behind Anyi Ward, in boots whose ribs she had read in the puddle. She did not yet know whose man he was. She would not turn her head to look for him. A woman who turned her head was a woman who knew she was being watched, and a woman who knew she was being watched was a woman whose head would, eventually, be a useful thing to know the price of.
The Drum Tower stood at the southwest corner of the imperial precinct, broad and squat and ordinary in the early light, and the drum on its summit had not yet sounded the second of its dawn calls. She rode past it. She did not look up. The drum-keeper, she had heard once at a Pingkang dinner, was bribable for a coin a beat. She did not yet know whether she would ever need to bribe a drum-keeper. She would.
Vermilion-Bird Avenue ran south through the centre of the city, a hundred and fifty paces wide where she crossed it, and even at this hour the width of it was a thing she felt as cold. There were three carters at its eastern verge waiting for the markets to open; one of them was eating a bing from a sleeve and watching her, not unkindly, the way a man watches any rider whose horse looks just slightly cleverer than its rider. She crossed the avenue at a walk. She turned west.
West of Vermilion-Bird the wards changed. The vermilion gates of the official quarters fell behind; the gates here were older and more various — some lacquered red, some unpainted, one or two painted the cobalt blue that the Sogdian merchants of Hexi favoured because cobalt was cheap in Khotan and they had brought a great deal of it with them when they came. The houses behind the gates were grander than Yongchong's and more compactly built. A Sogdian house in Chang'an, she had read in a customs filing once, was a single courtyard with two storeys around it, the upper floor for sleeping, the lower for trade, the gate strapped with iron because the household kept silver and frankincense in the cellars and not in a counting-house. She had filed the architecture. She had never been inside one.
At the gate of Liquan the sabao's deputy was waiting.
He was the man the runner had described. Half-Tujue, taller by a head than the sabao's ordinary men, his face a flat broad-cheeked Tang-frontier face above a Sogdian merchant's tunic — the tunic plain dark wool, the right sleeve embroidered at the cuff with the small repeating geometric mark of the An clan, the cuff worn shiny at the edge from a year or more of use. His knife sheath was where the runner had said it would be: under his coat, on the left, where a clan bodyguard's knife rode. He did not draw the knife. He bowed.
"Lady," he said, in good Tang. Then, in case she had doubts about his good Tang, in better Tang: "Lady, I am Aspand, of the deputy-house of the sabao of the Western Market. My master sends me to receive you."
"Aspand."
"Lady."
"Your master expects me before the noon drum."
"Before the dawn-drum's second, lady. My master has been at the gate since the fourth watch."
She filed fourth watch. The sabao's deputy had been at the gate for an hour. The sabao, if Aspand was telling the truth, had been at the gate for two. A sabao did not stand at his ward gate at the fourth watch. A sabao did not stand at any gate at any hour; he was a man whose entire dignity consisted of being inside a room. The sabao had been at the gate because the sabao had not wanted any other body to be there to be the one who saw her arrive. That was either a courtesy of unusual size or a precaution.
She had grown up registering precautions.
"Then I will not keep him."
The mare went through the gate behind Aspand at a walk. The street inside Liquan Ward — liquan meaning sweet spring, a name some Han clerk had given to the ward two centuries ago because of a well that had since gone bad and been bricked — narrowed almost immediately. The houses were close-built; the lower storeys leaned out over the street in the way that Sogdian wood-and-mud-brick favoured, so that the upper galleries almost met overhead and the morning sky above was a long narrow strip of grey. The smell of the ward came up to her in three layers: damp cellar leather first, then saffron from the open spice-stalls that would not open today but had left their walls perfumed; under both, a hot sharp animal smell which was, she thought, the camel-yard at the south of the ward, where the An clan kept their string of pack-camels in a wired pen against the south wall. The camels, knowing the hour, were already complaining. One of them, somewhere not far, was groaning in the long whistling complaint a camel made when it had been kept tied past its usual lying-down.
She felt the camel before she felt the rest of the ward, and she filed that, too. A household that had not let its camels lie down in twenty-eight hours was a household that had not done anything for twenty-eight hours.
Aspand led her west along the inner street and then south down the second turning. The third turning was a narrower lane, almost an alley, walled on both sides with the high blank walls of merchant compounds. At the end of the third turning was the third gate of Liquan — not the ward gate, that was the south one, but the third compound gate from the inner street, in local idiom the third gate. She had drawn it on her wax tablet last night. She did not need to look at her tablet. She had drawn it correctly.
The gate of the An compound was lacquered, but not red; it had been lacquered in the dark plum-brown that Sogdian Zoroastrians used for any door that touched a place of mourning, and the brown was old, several years old, the lacquer crazed at the corners in the small triangle pattern that meant the household had not had the gate redone since at least the elder An's death. A bronze lamp-bracket hung beside it. The lamp was out. The wick had been removed.
A Sogdian household, she remembered from one of her husband's circuit footnotes, kept a fire at the threshold lamp for so long as one member of the household was alive within. The wick had been removed. Someone, very recently, had told this gate that there was no one alive behind it to keep the fire for.
Aspand did not knock. He set his palm flat against the gate, three fingers spread, his thumb folded inward; he held the position for the count of perhaps four breaths; and the gate opened a hand's width from within, and a man's face — a Sogdian face, narrow-nosed, the eyes set deep and shadowed and red — looked out at her, registered her grey, and the gate swung inward.
She did not yet dismount. From the saddle she could see, through the open gate, the front court.
The front court of an An-clan compound was, by the customs records, a flagged rectangle of perhaps fifty by thirty paces, with the gate on its east face and the main hall on its west, the gallery on its north and the spice-warehouse on its south. Wanjun had drawn it correctly. The flagstones were dark with damp; spring dew had not yet burned off them, because no one had lit a brazier in the courtyard since yesterday. In the centre of the court, where the head of the house would have received a guest of importance, stood a tall painted screen.
The Bukharan screen.
It was, even at this hour and even from horseback, a beautiful object. Six panels, each perhaps the height of a man, painted on stretched silk and varnished and bound at the joints with worked brass. The painting was of a hunt — Sasanian style, men on slim horses pursuing antelopes through a stylised forest of pomegranate trees, the horses' tails knotted in the old way, the riders' headcloths streaming. Two thousand strings of cash. The youngest An wife had been said to use it to hang her wet linen.
There was no wet linen on it now. There was, instead, on the third panel from the left, a long dark smear shaped like the print of a wrist drawn slowly downward, and at the level of the painted antelope's neck a single round flake of brown — old brown, last-night brown — that the morning had not yet dried. Someone had touched the screen with a hand that had blood on it. They had touched it not to wipe the hand but to steady themselves.
She filed it.
She got down from the mare. She did so with the small inward dignity she always gathered when she got off a horse — bad with horses, she had said at six, and she had been right — and Aspand took the rein from her and gave it to a boy who came forward from a stall by the gate. The boy was Sogdian, perhaps twelve, his hair cut short in the Bukharan house-boy fashion, his eyes red as Aspand's. The boy did not look at her. The boy looked at the mare. He took the rein with hands that were shaking.
A house with that many shaking hands was not a house that had been quiet for twenty-eight hours by chance.
"The sabao," said Aspand.
The sabao stood inside the gate. He was a small spare man in his sixties, with a Sogdian merchant's grey-streaked beard combed forward over his collar and a Tang official's hat — the small ceremonial futou of a registered foreign-community headman — set straight on his head at an hour when no other sabao in the city would have his hat on. He had been wearing it, she thought, since dusk yesterday.
"Lady Cui," said the sabao. He bowed. His Tang was the careful Tang of a man who had passed the lay registry exam at fifty and had said nothing in his life in Tang that he had not first thought through in Sogdian. "I am Roshan, of the An. I receive you on behalf of my brother who is dead, and his sons who are dead, and the women of his house who are dead, and I beg of you the courtesy of your discretion within these walls."
"You have it," she said.
She bowed in return — the bow she used for a man of his rank, neither deeper nor shallower — and added, because the formula required it, "I come at the request of the Office of the Censorate, in the matter of religious rites for the unprepared dead, under license of the abbey of Lady Wei Wan, and I will conduct what I conduct under the eye of your household."
Roshan listened. He was a small man holding himself very straight. He had buried, she remembered with a small and quite unwelcome shock, two adult children in the smallpox of 745, and he had stood at the public funeral for them in this same plum-brown coat. She had read the sabao's annual roster from that year; the deaths had been recorded in it. He had not allowed his face, then or now, the indulgence of a private grief.
"My brother's hall," he said, "is at the end of the gallery. The dead are there. I have not permitted anything to be moved. I have permitted only the lamp at the gate to be put out, in the rite of our house, which is the rite of fire, and which you will not be asked to enter into. Lady Cui."
"Yes."
"The deputy of the censor is not here."
She registered that this was not a question. The sabao was, in his small careful way, informing her of something. The Censorate had not sent a deputy. The Censorate had not, in fact, formally heard of the deaths. Pei had sent her instead of the deputy because the deputy could not be sent yet, because the sabao had not yet officially reported and would not, the sabao had decided, officially report until a Daoist nun he had been told he could trust had stood inside the hall.
"Sabao," she said.
"Lady."
"Has the Office of the Western Market been informed."
"The Office," said Roshan, very levelly, "has been informed by my younger nephew, by hand of a runner, at the third hour of yesterday's afternoon. The Office sent a deputy to my gate at the fourth hour. The deputy" — and here his face did something that was not quite a smile and not at all a smile — "observed that he could not enter a Zoroastrian household at a moment of mourning without offence to the fire, and undertook to file the matter at the seventh hour of tomorrow, so that the clerks would not be detained from their dinners."
"He took a coin."
"Lady Cui."
"How heavy."
The old man met her eyes. He was, she realised, a man who would have liked, very much, to like her, and had not in this lifetime been able to afford the luxury.
"Three taels," he said.
She did not say anything. She filed the figure.
"It is not a large coin to keep an Office quiet," said the sabao, "but it is a coin large enough to tell me who paid it. I have not yet decided what I will do with that knowledge. I am — Lady Cui, I am old. I am informing you that the coin was three taels because the coin will become relevant to your work. It will not, today, become relevant to mine."
She bowed her head. The bow was not quite the bow of acknowledgement; it was the bow of receipt. He had given her a thing she would have to carry. He had told her that he knew who had bribed the Office, and that he would not act on the knowledge, and that she was not to expect him to. He had also told her, by the precision of three taels, that he had stood in the room while the deputy received the coin. A coin counted to the tael was a coin counted by a witness. The sabao had been present for his own bribe.
She would not, on his behalf, ask him why.
"Sabao."
"Lady."
"I will go in."
"My brother's son will accompany you."
He turned his head a quarter of a turn, and at the threshold of the gallery — she had not seen him there, which meant he had been standing very still — a man came forward into the light of the front court.
He was Sogdian, with the long-boned Persian narrowness of feature that the An clan had inherited from the mother's line, and he was perhaps twenty-eight, slim and tall and dressed in the unbleached white that the Sogdian Zoroastrians wore for mourning of a near kinsman. His hair was bound back from his face and he had not, last night, shaved. He had not slept. He had not, she thought, sat down. He held himself with the still patience of a man who had been waiting at a threshold for a long time, who had thought, perhaps, about what he would say when the threshold was crossed, and who had chosen — after considering several sentences — to say none of them.
His eyes were grey. She had not been expecting them to be grey. She had been expecting brown.
He came to within three paces of her and bowed. The bow was the bow of a younger man to a woman of equal rank, neither family nor stranger. He held it half a beat longer than a Tang man would have, which was Sogdian courtesy, and straightened.
"Lady Cui," he said.
"An gongzi."
"My uncle's house is grateful that you have come."
His Tang was excellent. It was excellent in the precise way the Tang of a foreign-born scholar was excellent: the syntax slightly too formal, the diction a half-degree too literary for the situation. He had been educated by a Han tutor, and the tutor had been a good one, and the tutor had not been from Chang'an — there was the faintest Hexi roundness in the gan. She filed his Tang. She filed the grey eyes. She filed the way he held his hands, loose at his sides, the right hand a fraction higher than the left, in the small unconscious way of a man who carried, daily, a sword and had today not carried one. The mourning white had no scabbard at the belt.
He looked at her, once, with the careful nothing the runner had described. The careful nothing was a face she knew from her father's outer hall: the face of a man who had decided not to be read and had not yet decided whether his decision had been the right one. He held the careful nothing for perhaps two breaths. Then it slipped, very slightly, at the left corner of the mouth — not a smile, nothing as gross as a smile, but the small involuntary acknowledgement of a man recognising that the woman he had heard about was indeed the woman in front of him, and that this was either a relief or a difficulty and he had not yet decided which.
"You are Lady Cui," he said.
"I am."
"My uncle wrote your husband's name in his ledger six months ago."
She had been about to walk past him, on Roshan's gesture, toward the gallery. She did not walk past him. She stopped.
"My husband," she said, "has been dead eighteen months."
"Yes."
"Your uncle wrote a dead man's name in his ledger."
"Yes."
"I see."
She did not, at that moment, see. She filed the sentence in the form he had given it. A Sogdian trade-house ledger was not a memorial book; one did not write a dead man's name in one. Either the elder An had been keeping a private accounting that used names ceremonially — which Sogdian trade-houses did not — or the elder An had not believed her husband was dead. The second possibility, considered for the length of one breath, was the kind of possibility she had trained herself to file and then to put behind a closed door in the orderly small room she kept for things she would not look at while she was working.
She put it behind the door. The door was iron.
"After," she said. "After the hall."
"After," he agreed.
He stepped back. He gestured, in the long-fingered way of a man who had been taught Han etiquette by a tutor who had been taught Sogdian etiquette by his mother, toward the gallery.
She walked. The flagstones rang slightly under her boots — the dryness of a courtyard in the second hour of dawn, the dampness eaten off by the wind from the western desert. The gallery was a roofed walkway, four paces wide, running the long axis of the compound from the front court to the main hall. The wooden beams overhead were painted in the alternating cinnabar and dark green of a Sogdian merchant household; the wall on her right, the gallery's south wall, was hung at intervals with small embroideries in the geometric style of Bukhara, each one perhaps the width of a hand, each one stitched in the bright crisp wool of Sogdian needlework and worn at the edges from being touched. She filed the embroideries. There were seven of them. A household embroidery was, in Sogdian custom, a small ancestral plaque commissioned at the birth of each living member of the house. There were seven hanging. One peg at the end of the gallery was empty.
A peg empty where seven hung was, she thought, either a plaque taken down for cleaning or a plaque taken down because the person commemorated had walked out of the house. She filed the empty peg.
At the end of the gallery the door to the main hall stood open. Two Sogdian house-women, both elderly, both in mourning white, stood at the threshold. They moved aside for her. They did not look at her. One was holding the other's hand.
She stepped over the threshold.
The hall ran the width of the compound, a long shallow room lit by the high small windows in its west wall. The windows had been opened to the dawn, because no fire could be kept in a hall of the dead until the rites had been said, and the morning had begun to come in pale across the floor. The floor was matted in the Sogdian way with woven reed mats, edged in dark red. At the centre of the room was a dining table — long, low, of the Sogdian pattern, with cushions instead of stools along its sides — and around the table were the dead.
She counted them.
Six.
She counted them again.
Six.
The runner had said the household. Pei had said the household. She had said seven. There were six.
She stood very still in the doorway and did not yet, this morning, choose what to feel about being one short. There were six bodies arranged at a dinner table at which six places had been laid. Six places. Not seven.
She had been wrong.
She filed I have been wrong in the small room she kept for it, which was not crowded.
An Naxia — Anaxa, the runner had called him, the Persian name; she had not yet earned the right to use it in her head — was at her shoulder. He had stepped into the hall behind her. He did not look at the table. He had, she thought, looked at the table enough.
"How many," she said.
"Six," said Anaxa.
"The household register lists seven."
"Yes."
"Who is missing."
"My aunt Datis," he said, "is in the apartments behind the fire-temple in Liquan. She did not eat at this table the night before last. She was at the fire-temple for the women's prayer."
"Datis is alive."
"Datis is alive."
"Then the dead are six and the missing is one — the servant girl. The girl your house kept in the kitchen."
He did not, for a moment, answer. She felt him decide to answer; she heard the very small intake of his breath as he chose.
"Yes," he said. "The girl is gone. Her name is Aroka."
She let his answer sit, beside her, in the small filed room. She would, later, take Aroka down and turn the name in the light. She did not, now. Now there were six bodies at a table and she had been wrong about one of them and she had thirty paces in which to be right about the others before her one chance to walk this room while no one had moved anything had ended.
She stepped forward.
She did not go to the table first. She went to the south window, opened against the morning, and stood with her back to the room and looked out at the small courtyard that the south window gave onto — the kitchen yard, narrow, walled, with a covered well in its centre and a single low door in its far wall that led, she remembered from the customs map, through to the spice-warehouse. The well was domed in the Sogdian way with a low brick cap and a wooden cover. The cover was on. There was, around the rim of the cap, a thin halo of damp moss. On the southern arc of the rim — the arc nearest the kitchen door — the moss was scraped. A clean curve, perhaps the length of her hand, of bared brick. It looked, in the early light, like a smile.
She filed the smile.
She turned. She walked around the table. She did not look at the faces yet.
The table was set in the Sogdian pattern, which she had read about and had never seen: a long rectangle, six places, three to a side, with the head-of-house's place at the east end where the rising sun would touch the bread first. The bread was on the table. The bread was a flat round Sogdian non loaf, broken into six pieces and laid one piece beside each place, as the custom required. The pieces were dry at the edges but still elastic in the middle. The bread had been broken at most thirty hours ago. The cellar coriander, in the small dish at the centre of the table, was green at the stem and brown only at the cut edge. A coriander cut thirty hours ago and kept in a covered hall was a coriander still green at the stem. She would, in a different room, have admired the freshness of the coriander.
The wine cups were six. Three on the south side of the table, three on the north. They were paired. Three of them were Sogdian — fluted brass, the rim chased with the small pomegranate pattern of a Bukharan workshop; three of them were Han — the white-glazed porcelain of the imperial kilns, the standard banquet cup of a wealthy Han household. Three and three. The Sogdian three were on the south side. The Han three were on the north side. The hosts had sat on the south. The guests had sat on the north.
There had been guests.
She filed the meal had been laid for guests. The runner had said the household. The runner had not said the household and the guests. She was now revising her arithmetic. Six places, three hosts, three guests. None of the guests were here. The hosts were all dead at the table.
She went on around the table.
She came to the head-of-house place at the east end. The elder An, the patriarch — Roshan's brother — lay where a man might lie if he had fallen forward off his cushion and been very gently lifted back upright into a seated arrangement against a pillar by someone who did not know how a Sogdian patriarch was supposed to sit. His head was tipped slightly to the right. His mouth was closed. His eyes were closed. His hands, both of them, were folded in his lap in the small careful way a mortician folded hands at a Buddhist laying-out. A Sogdian patriarch was not laid out Buddhist-style. A Sogdian patriarch's hands at death were not arranged at all by anyone but the naasalar — the body-washer of the household — and the naasalar did not work for thirty hours after the death, because the body was held to be defiled and the contamination must dissipate. The naasalar of this household had not yet entered the room. The hands had been folded by someone else.
She bent. She did not, this morning, in this hall, in front of An Naxia, touch the patriarch's hands. She looked. There was a faint pale crescent on the left thumbnail, the kind a bruise makes a day after the bruise is given, when the blood under the nail has begun to gather and to print. He had jammed his thumb. Recently. Within, she thought, the last two days.
She moved on.
The two sons of the patriarch sat — had been sat — at the second and third places along the south side. The elder of them, his face very pale, his mouth slightly open, was leaning a little toward the table. There was a small dark stain at the corner of his mouth — not blood, she thought; the dark of a thin liquid dried into the beard. She bent closer without touching. The smell was faint and faintly resinous. She thought of the bitter herbs she had read about in a customs filing on Hexi-route apothecary imports — gelsemium, the southern climbing vine, which in a sufficiently small dose produced a slow respiratory failure that resembled a peaceful sleep. Gelsemium would have been imported from Annam. The An clan, on the southern silk-and-spice manifests she had read in her husband's study, had not held a licence for it. Someone in this household had been drinking gelsemium. The dose, judging by the stain at the corner of the mouth and the faintness of the smell, had been not large. A man drinking that small a dose would have noticed.
He had not noticed. The wine had been carrying it.
She passed the younger son. She passed the first daughter-in-law, whose head was very gently inclined onto her own shoulder in the attitude of a woman asleep at the small hour of a long evening. She passed the second daughter-in-law and the nephew. She came to the west end of the table, where there was no chair and no body and no place — and where, on the matting itself, there was a faint indent: the rectangle of a cushion that had been there and was no longer.
A cushion had been removed.
She turned to An Naxia.
"There were seven places at this table," she said.
"There were six."
"There were seven. The cushion at the west end has been taken away."
He looked, for the first time, at the table. He looked at the rectangle of less-flattened reed where her hand was — she had not yet pointed, but he had seen what she had seen. He took half a step forward. He stopped.
"You are right," he said. "There were seven places."
"And six bodies."
"Yes."
"And the seventh place was at the foot of the table, opposite your uncle's head."
"Yes."
"In Sogdian table-grammar, the foot of the table is the guest-of-honour's seat."
He looked at her — a half-second longer than the look had needed to be. He said, very steadily: "Lady Cui knows our table-grammar."
"Lady Cui has read the customs filings of two hundred Sogdian households," she said, "and the sabao's annual roster, three years running, in her late husband's study."
He absorbed this. He did not, she saw, find it surprising. He had been told something about her, before this morning, that he had not yet decided whether to believe; he was now in the small inward process of upgrading the something.
"There was a guest," she said. "At the seat of honour."
"There was a guest."
"He has been removed from the table."
"He has been removed from the table."
"And he is the seventh person who is no longer in this house."
"Lady Cui."
"An gongzi."
He let a beat go. The hall was very quiet. The morning, outside the south window, had begun to be the proper colour of morning. Somewhere in the front court the camel groaned its complaint again. Somewhere closer — much closer — the old naasalar's low chant, which had begun without her noticing it, was setting up a slow figure of words in Sogdian that she did not know but that she filed, because she filed everything, against the day she would.
"The seventh man," said An Naxia, "is the guest my uncle had invited for the seventh hour of the night before last. The guest was, by my uncle's writing on the kitchen slate, a Han man of the Eastern Market. My uncle did not write his name. My uncle, in this household, did not usually write a guest's name on the slate when the guest was a man my uncle did not wish his womenfolk to ask about by name."
"And the kitchen slate."
"Is in the kitchen. It has not been wiped."
"Show me."
He bowed his head a quarter inch. He gestured at the south door of the hall, the door that led to the kitchen yard with the smiled well. She went. He followed her two paces behind, which was the courtesy of a man for a woman who was working.
At the door she stopped. She turned, in the doorway, and looked back at the room one more time, because she would not be in this room again with the bodies in their original arrangement. She fixed it. She walked it, in her mind, place by place: the patriarch with his folded hands, the elder son with the stain at the corner of his mouth, the younger son and his angle of lean, the two daughters-in-law and the nephew, the bread broken to six pieces, the coriander still green, the three brass cups and the three porcelain cups, the empty seventh place at the foot of the table where a cushion had been and was not. She fixed the dark smear on the third panel of the Bukharan screen in the front court. She fixed the empty peg at the end of the gallery. She fixed the sabao's figure of three taels. She fixed the wick missing from the threshold lamp. She fixed the camel that had not been allowed to lie down.
It took her, in the doorway, perhaps three seconds. An Naxia stood and waited. He had not, she thought, ever in his life seen a woman of his own generation do that with a room before, and he was making an effort not to look as though he were seeing it now.
"After you, lady," he said, very quietly, when she was done.
She went out into the kitchen yard. The well smiled at her, still, in the bared brick at the southern arc of its rim. She did not, this morning, go to it. The well would wait. The kitchen door was three paces from her right hand, and on the slate inside that door, the elder An had written, the night before last, in a hand she had not yet seen, a single line about a Han man of the Eastern Market whose name he had not chosen to record.
She crossed the yard. She did not look up at the high windows of the gallery, where she felt, without turning her head, the small movement of a woman — Datis, perhaps, who was alive — watching her from above. She filed the small movement. She would name it later.
A house with the doors closed too long becomes a tomb, she thought.
The kitchen door was not closed. It was ajar. The slate was where An Naxia had said it would be: hung on the inside of the door, by a leather thong, the chalk on its hook beside it. The slate had Sogdian on one side and Tang on the other. The Tang side was up.
The line on the slate was eight characters.
She read it. She read it twice.
She put her hand against the door-jamb and steadied herself, for the small flat half-second she allowed herself, in the manner of a woman who had been given, before her work had properly begun, the first of the day's small flat private blows. Then she filed the line. She read it a third time, for the fixing. She did not yet — not in this kitchen, not in front of An Naxia, not in this hour of this morning — let her face do anything about it.
The eight characters were: 东市张氏, 七刻, 茶罢留饭. Zhang of the Eastern Market, seventh hour, tea after which he stays for the meal.
A Han silk-merchant of the Eastern Market. Zhang. The clan name was one character; it was the name of a clan with two thousand households in Chang'an alone, and a great many of those households kept shops in the Eastern Market, and her husband, eighteen months dead, had written, on a slip of paper she had not yet read in the lacquered box on her desk, a list of names of which one was Zhang.
She turned the slate over. The Sogdian side bore three lines in a hand she could not read.
"An gongzi."
"Lady."
"Can you read this."
He looked. His face did not, for the briefest possible instant, do nothing. Then it did. It did, very carefully, nothing.
"Yes," he said.
"Read it."
He read it. He read it aloud in Sogdian first, because — she thought — he was buying himself the half-second of translation, and then in Tang, because she had asked him to.
"It says," he said, "if the Han pig comes again uninvited, I will set the dog on him and answer the magistrate later. It is in my uncle's hand. It is dated, by the small mark at the head of the line, to the morning of the day before yesterday. The Han pig is" — he paused; he chose — "a man my uncle did not like."
"A Han man of the Eastern Market."
"A Han man of the Eastern Market."
"Who came to dinner the night the dog was not set on him."
"Lady Cui."
"Yes," she said. "I see."
She did, this time, see. She filed the Han pig. She filed the patriarch's writing on the morning of the day before the dinner — he had threatened to set the dog on the guest he had then sat down to eat with. A man writing such a line in the morning and entertaining the man at the seventh hour of the same evening was a man who had been compelled, between the morning slate and the evening table, to be civil to a person he had told his own kitchen he would not be civil to. Compelled by what, she did not yet know. Bound to power, the sabao's deputy might have said — the phrase she had not yet heard but would, before the noon drum, hear from the sabao's own mouth.
She gave the slate back to An Naxia. He hung it on its thong. He did not, she noticed, put it back exactly square on the hook; he hung it so that the Tang side faced the wall.
"An gongzi."
"Lady."
"I will need to see the cellars, the spice-warehouse, the kitchen storeroom, the well, the room in which your aunt Datis slept the night before last, and the gate-boy. Not yet. First I will sit for the count of one hundred in the front court and write three lines on a slate of my own."
"Yes."
"After that you will tell me," she said, very calmly, looking at him for the first time at his own eye-level and without the courtesy of distance, "what your uncle was being asked to do for the Han pig of the Eastern Market, and why he had decided to do it after he had decided not to. I do not ask you to tell me everything. I ask you to tell me what your uncle was being asked to do. I will know if you tell me a lie. I will not be insulted by the lie. I will be inconvenienced by it. We have, between us, the time between now and the noon drum to be useful to each other. After the noon drum we will be useful to other people."
He looked at her. The careful nothing was gone from his face. In its place there was, for the first time, a look she could read. The look was not surprise. The look was the small inward acknowledgement of a man who had been told something he had been told before and had heard, this time, in a voice he had not been expecting.
"Lady Cui," he said, "I will tell you the part I am permitted to tell you. The rest I will tell you when I am permitted."
"By whom."
"By myself."
She filed by myself. She filed his grey eyes. She filed the way he stood, in his mourning white, beside the kitchen door, with his right hand a fraction higher than his left in the unconscious habit of the swordless man.
"That will do," she said, "for now."
She walked back across the kitchen yard. The well, behind her, smiled. The camel, in the front court, groaned. The morning, somewhere above the high blank walls of the An compound, completed itself into the proper colour of a Chang'an spring morning at the second hour of dawn. Somewhere in the centre of the city the second of the dawn drums sounded for the second time, and was answered, faintly and a long way off, by the bell tower in the eastern wards.
A house with the doors closed too long becomes a tomb, she thought.
The doors of this house had been closed too long. She would, now, open them.