Chapter Three
The Count of One Hundred
She sat in the front court on the low cedar bench against the gallery wall, with the Bukharan screen at her right hand and the small wax tablet on her knees, and she counted, in silence, to one hundred. She did this because her father had taught her, at eleven, that the first hundred breaths in a strange room were a tax a careful witness paid to her own attention — and that those who did not pay the tax tended, later, to find their attention paid to them in coin they had not budgeted for. She counted by the small slow opening and closing of her own hands in her sleeves, and she did not, in the hundred, allow herself to think.
She allowed herself, instead, to register.
The flagstones underneath her feet were dressed limestone, laid in the year of the elder An's marriage to the patriarch's wife — there was, near the gate, a single stone with the date inscribed in small Sogdian numerals at its corner; she had read the customs petition that recorded the household's compound expansion. The stones had been swept, recently, by a careful hand. The careful hand had missed one place: at the foot of the third panel of the Bukharan screen, on the flagstone directly beneath the smear of brown, there was a fine pale dust about the size of a copper coin, the kind of dust a domestic broom shed when the broom was new. The dust had been pushed there. It had not been there yesterday afternoon, when the screen had been touched by a bleeding hand, because the bleeding hand had not bled onto the flagstone. The dust was younger than the smear. The dust was younger by a sweep.
She filed the dust.
The gallery's roof beams, painted alternating cinnabar and dark green, were laced near the front court with the soot of a brazier that had not been lit since the morning before last. A Sogdian household kept a brazier under the gallery overhang from the close of winter to the close of spring; the An household had stopped lighting theirs the day the patriarch had written Han pig on the kitchen slate. Or perhaps the morning of. She could not yet date it more precisely. She would.
The lamp at the gate had its wick removed. The bracket was empty. The brass of the bracket was, where the lamp had hung, a different colour from the brass of the bracket where it had not — a faint matte halo on the brass where the daily oil-vapour of the wick had clouded it. The halo was, she thought, exactly the size and shape of the absent wick.
The seven embroideries in the gallery — six commemorating present house-members, one for a member who had walked out — hung at intervals along the south wall in the order of their making. The empty peg was at the western end. The end nearest the main hall. A member who had walked out toward the main hall. She filed toward the hall.
A small Sogdian girl in plain unbleached cotton — a kitchen girl, she thought, not a member of the family but a household servant of perhaps fourteen — came out of the gallery and walked across the front court to the gate, carrying a covered basin in both hands. She did not look at Wanjun. She set the basin down at the inner side of the gate. She returned. The basin, by its smell as she passed Wanjun, held wash-water. The wash-water had been used to clean a body. The body had been a body whose washing required salt. Salt, she remembered from her husband's footnote on Sogdian rites — handed her over a small dinner three winters ago — was poured into the wash-water of a Zoroastrian body to drive away the small corpse-demon the religion held would otherwise infect the washer. The kitchen girl had been pressed, against custom and against her age and against her work-position, into laying out at least one of the dead.
She filed the kitchen girl. She would speak to her before noon.
At the count of seventy-two — she counted, in her sleeves, by the slow open of her right hand and the closing of her left — she heard, from the gallery, the soft step of An Naxia. He had come to a stop perhaps three paces inside the gallery's south arcade, in the shadow, where he would not be in her sight unless she turned her head. He had stood and watched her count for the last twenty-eight breaths. He had stood without moving. He had stood, she thought, in the way her father had stood at the back of his outer hall when she was small and had been allowed to listen to a deposition: a man who had decided, for whatever reason of his own, that the woman in the room was the one to whom the room currently belonged.
She did not turn her head.
She finished the hundred.
She opened her sleeve, took out the wax stylus, and wrote, in the small economical hand she used for tablets she meant to wipe before sundown, three lines.
One: the meal had been laid for seven, not six. The seventh place was at the foot of the table. The seventh place was the seat of the Han guest. The Han guest's name is Zhang.
Two: a hand with blood on it touched the third panel of the Bukharan screen. The flagstone beneath was swept after. The sweeper was not the bleeder.
Three: the wick of the threshold lamp has been removed, in the rite of a fully ended household. Datis is alive. The household is not fully ended. The wick was removed by a person who does not yet wish the household to recover.
She held the tablet on her knees for a moment. She read the three lines once. She did not, then or later in this morning, wipe them.
She slid the tablet into her sleeve and stood up.
"An gongzi."
He came forward out of the shadow. He had taken off the small bound cord that had held his hair back from his face in the dawn; the cord was in his right hand. His hair had fallen forward over his temples. He had not, in the four hours she had been in his uncle's compound, sat down.
"Lady."
"The Han guest. Tell me what your uncle was being asked to do."
He did not, this time, weigh the moment. He had — between the kitchen yard and the gallery — decided.
"My uncle," he said, "was being asked to receive consignments of uncut Khotanese stone into the An warehouse, hold them for one or two market days, and pass them on, without entering them in the household's customs ledger, to a Tibetan agent of the spring caravan."
She filed it. She filed uncut Khotanese. She filed not in the ledger. She filed Tibetan agent.
"For payment in what."
"Silver. Hexi-route silver, in ingots, bearing — by my younger cousin's report, which I have not yet verified — a frontier-army stamp."
"How many consignments."
"Three over the past nine months. The fourth was due this spring. My uncle had agreed to the first three under pressure I will, in another room, describe to you. He had refused the fourth. The fourth was the Han pig's purpose, the night before last."
"Pressure of what kind."
"The first consignment came with a letter," said An Naxia, "naming my sister An Bibi by her household. My sister is married into the household of a man whose name I will not speak in this court at this hour. The letter was a courtesy. My uncle understood the courtesy. He took the first consignment. The second came with no letter. The third came with no letter and a note of thanks. The fourth was to come with a different letter, naming a different woman of our house, and my uncle had decided — the morning he wrote Han pig on the slate — that the fourth would not come, and that he would write to my brother and to the sabao and to the Censorate, in that order, and that he would do so by the noon drum yesterday."
She listened. She let the sentence finish, and she let the silence after it settle into the shape of a sentence that had taken her witness three hours, in some inward room of his own, to decide to give her.
"And the noon drum yesterday."
"My uncle was dead by the eleventh hour of the night before last."
"Three hours after the Han pig sat down at his table."
"Yes."
"You found him."
"I did not find him. The sabao's deputy found him. I came when I was sent for."
"At what hour."
"The third hour of the afternoon."
"And the slate had not been wiped."
"The slate had not been wiped."
"Because."
He looked at her. He had — she saw it — been waiting for the question, and had not yet decided whether he would answer it.
"Because," he said, "the sabao's deputy, who is my cousin Aspand and who was here in this compound before I was, found my uncle's body at the table and went, before anyone else came, to the kitchen and read the slate, and decided he would not wipe it, and decided he would not show it to the sabao's clerks, and decided he would show it to me. I came at the third hour. He showed it to me. We decided, together, that it would not be wiped, and that the slate would be turned to the wall, and that if any Han clerk entered this kitchen before a person we trusted entered the hall, the clerk would find a slate face-down. We turned the slate this morning before you arrived."
"And the sabao."
"The sabao came at the eleventh hour of yesterday's morning. The sabao arranged for the Office of the Western Market to be inattentive until the seventh hour of tomorrow. The sabao, lady, is paying three taels for the inattention out of his own purse, against the day he can be paid back from a household that no longer has a head. He is — I do not say this as a man's nephew, lady; I say it as a man who has observed; the sabao is being a Sogdian patriarch of an old kind."
"He has not, then, sent for the Censorate."
"He has sent for you. Through Vice-Censor Pei, by way of a soliloquy. He did not send for the Censorate."
"He does not trust the Censorate."
"Lady Cui, no Sogdian household with three frontier-army silver ingots in its cellar and a Khotanese consignment unaccounted for at the spring caravan trusts the Censorate. The sabao trusts a Daoist nun under license of an abbey whose abbess is the half-sister of the Prince of Min's mother, and who once stood in the An clan's sabao-temple, fifteen years ago, in her own grey, to receive the cremated bones of my elder brother's first wife. The sabao sent for Lady Wei Wan. Lady Wei Wan sent for you."
She had not been expecting that. She filed Lady Wei Wan sent for you. The chain of summons had passed through her teacher and through Pei before it had reached her, and Pei had given her the soliloquy, and Pei had not mentioned Lady Wei Wan. The soliloquy was a Pei courtesy: he had not wanted her to think herself called by her teacher's debt rather than by her own license. The soliloquy was also a Pei caution: he had wanted, if the case went wrong, to be a man who had sent a runner and not a man who had moved a piece. She filed the cautions. She would, later, file the courtesy too.
"An gongzi."
"Lady."
"You are telling me the truth."
"In the parts I am telling you, yes."
"The parts you are not telling me."
"Concern my sister."
"I will not ask about your sister."
"Thank you."
"Not yet."
He bowed his head a degree, in the small acknowledgement of a man receiving the proper Tang for I will not ask now, I will ask later. He had, she saw, the syntax of a man who had been raised in two registers. He could hear what she had said and what she had implied at the same time. That was either a gift of his tutor's making or a habit of his life's. Either way, she filed it.
"The Tibetan agent of the spring caravan."
"Has not yet come. The fourth consignment was the offer. The Tibetan was to come ten days hence."
"You will be there."
"Lady?"
"You will be there, an gongzi, in your house in mourning white, ten days hence, when the Tibetan comes to receive a consignment that no longer exists. You will receive him courteously. You will tell him your uncle is dead. You will note, very precisely, his face, his name, his clothing, his retainers, and the route by which he leaves. You will, before he leaves, decline, politely, to give him the consignment. You will not tell him why. You will not tell him you have spoken to me. You will not tell him that the matter is closed. You will tell him to come back in twenty days."
He listened.
"You wish me," he said, "to set bait for him."
"I wish you to count him."
"Twenty days will bring him back inside the second drum-cycle of the case."
"Twenty days will bring him back at a moment when the case will be officially closed, on the public record, by the arrest of a Manichaean lay cell. You will say, then, that the consignment was lost in the disturbance. He will believe you. He will not believe you for long. He will return a third time. The third time he will bring a man we will want to see."
"Lady Cui."
"An gongzi."
"You are constructing your case nine days before the case will be closed."
"I am constructing my case before I have it. It is a habit I learned from my father, who said it was the only way to be sure that, when the case arrived, one had the right shaped basket for it."
He looked at her again. She was not yet sure what he was seeing. She filed the look.
"I will be at the gate ten days hence," he said, "and I will count him."
"Good."
She walked, without further comment, to the third panel of the Bukharan screen.
She did not, this time, sit down. She stood at perhaps three feet's distance and looked at the painting. The hunt in the screen was, by Sasanian convention, a metaphor for the kingly virtues; the antelopes were the prey of the soul, the riders were the appetites of the king. She had read a Persian treatise on the iconography, in translation, in a sealed corner of her late husband's library. She did not look at the iconography. She looked at the smear.
The smear ran downward in the shape, as she had registered from the saddle, of a wrist drawn slowly downward. It was, in the closer view, in two parts: a long thin downward streak, the print of the back of a wrist running against a vertical surface, and at the bottom of the streak a small round flake — a single droplet that had fallen from a higher position, where the wrist had paused, and had dried at the lower margin of the streak. The droplet was old enough to be brown but young enough to retain its meniscus at the edge: it had dried, she thought, between the eleventh hour of two nights ago and the second hour of yesterday morning. Twelve hours, give or take.
She took out the wax tablet and drew, in two strokes, the streak and the droplet.
The streak was at the height of her shoulder. The painter, at the time of the painting, had been a Bukharan court craftsman whose name was on the brass tag at the screen's western edge — Ardashir, son of Hormizd, in the Persian year that corresponded to the Tang Tianbao third. Sixty-five inches: she measured by the eye she had trained, at her father's elbow, on doorframes and on coffins. The wrist that had brushed the panel had been the wrist of a man perhaps two finger-widths shorter than the average Sogdian male. Or it had been the wrist of a tall woman.
A woman would not, in this household, in any ordinary moment, have leaned her bleeding wrist against the third panel of the painted Bukharan screen the youngest An wife used for hanging her linen. A woman of this household would have, even in the moment of dying, kept her shoulder off the painted silk of the screen. The screen was a thing this household kept its bodies away from. She filed the household decorum. The wrist had been a man's.
A man two finger-widths shorter than the average Sogdian was, in Chang'an, almost certainly Han. She did not require almost. She required, on a wax tablet she would copy onto silk by tomorrow night, the shape of the deduction. She wrote, beside the small sketch of the smear, Han male. She did not write Zhang.
She walked around the screen to its rear.
The rear of the screen was unpainted brown silk on stretched lacquered wood. The wood was clean. The silk was clean. The lacquer at the third panel's rear bore — at exactly the level of her own waist, in the small subtle scuff that a man's belt-buckle made when the man had stood close enough behind the screen to brush it — a thin horizontal scratch, the length of her thumb, raw and pale in the dark lacquer.
The man with blood on his wrist had stood behind the screen for some part of the night before last.
He had stood with his back to the screen — buckle-side — facing the gallery side of the front court. He had stood there long enough to brush the lacquer with his belt. He had not stood there long enough to wear the scuff deeper than a thumb's length. Perhaps a quarter of an hour. Perhaps less. He had then come around the screen — to its front, to its painted face — and, dizzy or bleeding or both, had braced himself with the back of his wrist against the third panel, and the wrist had been bleeding, and a drop had fallen, and he had walked on.
In which direction had he walked.
She walked to the front of the screen again. She looked at the angle of the smear. The streak was vertical; the streak did not, by itself, indicate a direction. The droplet, however, had fallen straight down from the wrist; the droplet's small edge — where the meniscus had set — was very faintly elongated in the direction the wrist had then moved. The elongation was, she thought, toward the gate.
He had walked toward the gate. He had been bleeding. He had been carrying — she thought, but did not yet write — a small object in his other hand: there was no second smear, no second print, anywhere on the screen, and a bleeding man who used both hands to brace himself dripped from both wrists. He had used only one. The other hand had been carrying.
She wrote, beside Han male, carried something out.
She turned. She stood, between the screen and the gallery, and surveyed the front court as he would have surveyed it, in his dizzy moment, before walking. The gate was directly opposite the gallery's south arcade. The gate was, from his standing point, about fifteen paces. The boy at the gate stall would not have been there at the night hour the man had been bleeding. The threshold lamp would have been lit. The household, two hours after the dinner, would have been — by her arithmetic of gelsemium dosage — in the early respiratory stage of a slow collapse: not yet dead, no longer mobile, settled at their cushions in the false sleep the poison engineered. The Bukharan screen would have been between the dying men at the table and the bleeding man at the gate.
The screen had been a thing he had hidden behind.
She filed the screen as a hiding place.
"An gongzi."
"Lady."
"The youngest An wife. Did she sleep, the night before last, in the chamber above the gallery, on the gallery's north side."
"Yes."
"Above the painted screen."
"Yes."
"At what hour did she come down to dinner."
"She did not. She was unwell. She had taken her dinner in her chamber. She was at the second window above us when the sabao's deputy entered the compound at the third hour of yesterday afternoon."
"She was at the window the whole night."
"She — Lady Cui."
"At the whole night."
He looked at her. The look this time was not the careful nothing, nor the small upgrade of her in his mind, nor the acknowledgement that he had heard her thinking faster than he had been trained to hear a woman think. The look was — and she filed it carefully because it was important — the small inward recognition of a man who had been about to lie and had decided not to.
"My uncle's youngest wife was at the window for some part of the evening," he said. "I do not know what part. She was asleep when the sabao's deputy arrived. She is asleep now, by her own choice, in the apartments behind the fire-temple, where she was taken by my cousin Aspand at the fourth hour of yesterday afternoon, before the sabao came. She slept the day. She woke at dusk. She will not speak of what she saw."
"To you."
"To anyone. To me. To the sabao. To my aunt Datis."
"To me."
He thought about this. He did not answer immediately. She watched him think. She was not, on the whole, in the habit of letting witnesses think; her father had taught her that letting a witness think was letting a witness lie. She let An Naxia think. She let him think because she had decided, between the kitchen yard and the screen, that he was not the witness; he was the broker.
"To you," he said. "Perhaps. If you sit with her, in her aunt's apartment, in your grey, with the fire-temple wall between you and the city. She will not speak to a man. She might speak to a woman. She might speak to a Daoist nun if the Daoist nun is the woman of whom her dead father-in-law has written, six months ago, in his ledger. I will arrange it."
She inclined her head.
"Then," she said, "I will see her, in the apartments behind the fire-temple, this afternoon."
"This afternoon," he agreed.
She walked back toward the bench against the gallery wall. She did not sit. The morning was past the second drum-cycle now; the hour had thickened, and the small busy noises of a city waking had begun, somewhere beyond the high blank walls, to make themselves heard. A man was shouting, somewhere east, about a barrel of pickled fish. A woman was scolding a child. A camel — perhaps the same camel — groaned again, but more briefly, as if to test the air. The compound was very quiet inside its walls. The kitchen girl crossed the front court again with a covered basin; she did not look at Wanjun this time either, but the way she did not look had a different shape from the first crossing. She had been told, between crossings, who Wanjun was.
Wanjun stopped at the corner of the gallery. She turned.
"An gongzi," she said. "I will be paid."
"Yes."
"Khotanese jade, one piece, of cut grade, to be held in escrow with the sabao until the case closes. Standard fee for an investigation under religious cover."
"Yes."
"And."
"Lady."
"And I will see your aunt Datis this afternoon, the youngest An wife also this afternoon if she will see me, the kitchen girl now, and the sabao himself before I leave this compound this morning. I will come back to this house at the noon drum tomorrow to walk the kitchen storeroom, the spice-warehouse and the well with Brother Hui at my elbow; you will arrange a Sogdian translator if the kitchen girl will not speak Tang; the sabao's deputy will deny the Office of the Western Market entry to this compound until I have walked it twice; you will not, before I have walked it twice, allow the bodies to be removed from the hall. The bodies will be cold by tomorrow; that is acceptable for my purposes; I will not require — you will be relieved to hear — that they be kept warm. The hall will be locked. The keys will be held by the sabao, by Aspand, and by you. Not by me. The keys are not, for the moment, my problem."
He listened. She paused. She added, in the small dry voice she used when she was about to say a thing she was not yet sure she was permitted to say:
"And the gate-lamp at the threshold. Have the wick replaced this evening."
He looked at her.
"Lady Cui."
"It does not lie to your god to keep the flame at the lamp while one woman of the household is still alive. It tells the household's enemy that the household is not, after all, fully ended. It tells the household's enemy that we have noticed his courtesy. He took the wick. We will put it back."
"Datis is alive."
"Datis is alive. Put the flame back tonight, at dusk, for Datis. Light it from a brand at the sabao-temple, not from a brand of this house. Do it in front of the kitchen girl."
He did not, for a long beat, speak. The small unconscious habit of his right hand — riding a fraction higher than his left, where the absent swordbelt had been — closed and opened, once, at his side.
"Yes," he said. "Lady Cui."
She walked across the front court. She walked past the screen with its mended composure. She walked under the threshold lamp with its absent wick. She came to the gate, and at the gate Roshan the sabao was waiting for her — he had heard her voice, or had decided not to be elsewhere when she emerged; she did not yet know which — and he stood with his ceremonial futou very straight on his old head and his hands folded inside his sleeves.
"Sabao."
"Lady."
"Will you walk with me to the corner of the street."
He bowed. He turned. He preceded her — the courtesy of an elder to a younger — through the small private gate, three paces forward, and they stood together at the corner of the lane and the inner street of Liquan. The inner street had begun to be a street again. A water-seller had set down his pole twenty paces away and was, with the methodical patience of his trade, slopping his ladle into the courtyard pots that were left out for him at every fifth door. The water-seller did not look at them. The water-seller had been looking at the An gate for two days. He would not, today, be paid for looking.
"Sabao."
"Lady Cui."
"You said three taels."
"Three taels."
"The Office's deputy is one of two clerks who, in the last fourteen months, has accepted gifts at the An gate. The other, I think, is a junior recorder named Cao. Cao took half a tael in winter, on a manifest correction; the deputy took three. The deputy is the senior. The deputy has only one principal."
The old man looked at her sidelong.
"You have read our customs filings."
"I have read your customs filings, and the Office's tax ledger for the last three years, and the Censorate's rotation roster for the same period, in the days when my late husband was alive. The deputy was bribed yesterday by a clerk of a Han merchant. The clerk's master is the master who sat at your brother's table the night of the dinner. The clerk's master paid not because his name was on the slate — he did not yet know his name was on the slate — but because three taels was the standing price he paid the Office to keep his name off the Office's daily inquiry list. He had been paying that price every market-day for, I would say, a year and a half."
"Lady Cui."
"You have known this."
"I have suspected this."
"And you have not, until this morning, decided to do anything about it."
"Lady Cui."
"Sabao."
"I have," said the old man, very quietly, "been alive in this city for fifty-seven years. The last twenty of them I have been sabao of the second-ranking trade-house of the second-ranking community of foreigners in the largest city the world has built. I am not a man who has spent his life not knowing. I am a man who has spent his life choosing the small precise moments in which to admit, in another man's hearing, the thing he has known. This morning, in your hearing, is one of those moments. There will not be many more. I am, as I told you on the threshold, old."
She looked at him. He was a small straight man with a grey beard and an old straight back, and he had buried twelve members of his community in the smallpox of 745, and two children of his own marriage in the same year, and he was, on this morning of his brother's death, conducting a transaction in the standing currency of an old caution. She did not, in the small private room she kept for such currencies, hold his caution against him.
"Sabao."
"Lady."
"I will need, from you, three names. The Office's deputy. The junior recorder Cao. And the Han merchant of the Eastern Market whose clerk has, every market-day for the last eighteen months, been paying your Office to overlook him."
"You know the third name."
"I know the clan."
"The third name," said the sabao, in the level Tang of a man who had decided, at his age and on his own terms, that he would in this moment risk the inconvenience of having spoken, "is Zhang Cong. He has a silk shop on the second turning west of the Eastern Market north gate. He has a small private cellar entered through a moved floor-loom. He has seven doors between the street and his own desk. He paid for his lacquer to be redone eight days ago by a Henanese journeyman whose name I will, before noon, send to you. He paid the Office's deputy in this matter three taels, and he paid the Office's deputy in a previous matter, eleven days ago, five. The previous matter, I think — I cannot be sure; I am informing you that I cannot be sure — was the matter of arranging that a kitchen girl from a Sogdian household should be conveniently mislaid in a willow grove at Bashang. The kitchen girl has not yet been mislaid. Whether she will be mislaid before you are paid your jade, lady, is a question for which I do not yet have the answer."
She filed it. She filed all of it. She filed Zhang Cong, the silk shop, the moved floor-loom, the seven doors, the lacquer redone eight days ago, the journeyman from Henan, the three taels and the five taels and the kitchen girl in the willow grove who had not yet been mislaid. She filed the sabao's small precise courage. She filed his face. She filed, in the same small private room, the door behind which she had put, half an hour ago in the kitchen, the eight characters on the slate. The room was, after the sabao's sentence, much more crowded than it had been an hour before.
She bowed.
"Sabao," she said. "I will be back at the noon drum tomorrow with Brother Hui. I will require, by the noon drum tomorrow, that you have done two things. One: that the lamp at this gate be lit at dusk tonight by a brand from your fire-temple. Two: that no man, no woman, no child, no clerk, no Censorate deputy and no Office of the Western Market deputy be admitted into this compound, on any pretext, by anyone, until I am again standing at this gate."
"Yes."
"I will say it again because I will need you not to think about it. No one. Not Aspand. Not your wife. Not your sister. Not the priest of the fire-temple. No one. Aspand and the priest of the fire-temple may stand at the gate. They may not enter. The dead are not yours to mourn yet. They are mine to read."
He looked at her with an expression of a kind she had not, in eighteen months, been looked at with.
"Lady Cui," he said. "I will keep your hall."
She did not, in the lane outside Liquan, allow herself to be moved by the sabao's sentence. She filed it. She bowed once more. She turned. She walked back to the gate. She did not look at the screen, or the empty peg, or the threshold lamp, or An Naxia, who had remained inside the front court and had stepped aside, when she came through the gate, with the courtesy of a man getting out of her way as he might have gotten out of the way of a magistrate.
The mare was at the gate with the boy. The boy gave her a leg up. She settled herself.
"An gongzi."
"Lady."
"This afternoon."
"This afternoon."
"At the apartments behind the fire-temple."
"At the apartments behind the fire-temple."
"Have your aunt Datis decide whether she will see me before I arrive. I would prefer not to surprise an old woman in her own mourning."
"Yes."
"And."
"Lady."
"I will not, at the gate of this house, ask you, in the hearing of the gate-boy, whether your sister An Bibi is well. I will, however, expect that, at the apartments behind the fire-temple this afternoon, you will tell me, on your own initiative, why your sister An Bibi's name is one I will, eventually, need to know."
He bowed his head. He did not promise. He did not refuse. He inclined the eighth of an inch that meant, in the Tang of a man educated by both a Sogdian mother and a Han tutor, I have heard you and I will think about it. She filed the inclination. She turned the mare. The mare, at her hand, went out into the lane.
Aspand walked beside the mare to the ward gate. He did not speak. He did not need to speak. At the ward gate he stepped aside, and she rode out, alone, into the inner streets of Liquan as they began to be streets again. The water-seller had moved on; a noodle-seller had set up two doors down with a small charcoal brazier and a steaming kettle; somewhere east, in the long row of Sogdian wineshops that lined the spice-row, a shutter was opening for the day. The morning had become, all around her, an ordinary spring morning in the Western quadrant of the largest city in the world. She rode through it. She rode east through it, toward Yongchong. She rode at the slow walk of a woman in no hurry.
She thought, as she rode, about the seven doors. She thought about the lacquer redone eight days ago. She thought about the small round flake of brown at the level of the painted antelope's neck. She thought about the kitchen girl who had been carrying the body-water. She thought about the empty peg at the end of the gallery, which she had filed at the count of forty-three and which she had not yet asked An Naxia about, because she had decided that asking him at the gate would have given him the choice of two answers and asking him this afternoon, in the apartments behind the fire-temple, beside his living aunt, would give him only one.
She thought, at the corner of Vermilion-Bird and the avenue, about the lacquered letter-box on her desk in Yongchong, and about the list of names her husband had not yet shown her, and about the eight characters on the slate, and about the Han clan of two thousand households in Chang'an alone, of whom one — possibly one — had today acquired a face and a shop and a redone lacquer.
She did not, this morning, ride home through Pingkang. Madam Khorshid would be sleeping. She would, in the late afternoon, go to Madam Khorshid. By the late afternoon she would know what to ask.
She rode past the Drum Tower at the third hour of the morning. The drum did not sound. The drum was at rest until the noon-drum's first call. The Drum-keeper, sitting in his small wooden booth at the foot of the tower, looked at her without expression as she passed. He had a long thin face she had not, before this morning, ever paid attention to. She paid attention to him this morning. She filed his face. She rode on.
By the time she reached the gate of Yongchong, Nanny Zhou was waiting at the inner threshold of the kitchen door, and the gate-boy had the bar half-raised before she came in sight, and the small dark shape of a runner — not the runner of last night; an older man, in the dun-grey of a Pei runner with the older insignia at the cuff — was waiting at the inside of her gate with both hands folded inside his sleeves.
She rode through. The bar dropped behind her. The runner bowed.
"My lord has been observing aloud, mistress."
"At this hour."
"At this hour."
"Then come in," she said.
She dismounted. She let the boy take the mare. She walked, in her grey, past the runner and across the courtyard to her writing-room, and she filed, as she crossed the threshold, the small unmistakable fact that Pei had sent a second runner before she had returned home and before, by the standing arrangement of soliloquies, she had given him reason to send one. Pei had sent the second runner because something had happened in the city, between dawn and the third hour of the morning, that Pei wanted her to know before she had finished thinking about the An compound. Pei was not a man who interrupted a thought. Pei was a man who, when he interrupted a thought, did so because the next thought was now the load-bearing one.
She sat down at her writing-desk. She did not unbar her sleeve. She did not yet take out the wax tablet on which she had drawn the streak on the screen.
"Speak," she said. "The soliloquy."
The older runner cleared his throat. He was perhaps forty, with a small grizzled beard and the careful close-cropped Tang of a man who had been in Pei's service for fifteen years.
"My lord observes," he said, "that the senior clerk of the Office of the Western Market, in the matter of the An household, sent at the first hour of this morning a junior recorder to the lacquer shop of one Zhang Cong of the Eastern Market, by the second turning west of the north gate. My lord observes that the junior recorder was seen to enter the lacquer shop and to leave it at the second hour, carrying a sealed slip in his sleeve. My lord observes that the sealed slip, by the small wax-print on the seal, bears the device of the Han silk-merchants' guild. My lord observes that this device, by long standing custom, is used only on letters internal to the guild. My lord observes that a letter internal to the guild, sealed in the Office of the Western Market and carried by a junior recorder, is a letter that has been laundered, in transit, from a thing it was not into a thing it now appears to be. My lord observes that the letter was, by my lord's quietest of inquiries, addressed to a senior censor at the Censorate, by name, by sealed cover. My lord observes" — and here the runner paused in the old Pei way — "that the senior censor named on the cover is Censor Lu Zhongming."
She sat very still.
"He is laying his trail," she said, aloud, to the runner. The runner, who was not paid to acknowledge a soliloquy, kept his eyes on the floor.
She thought, in the small hot still way she always thought when she had been moved. Zhang Cong had, in the space of three hours between her dismount in Liquan Ward and her return to Yongchong, opened a private channel into the Censorate by way of a clerk who would, by the seventh hour of tomorrow, be sworn to the integrity of the channel. He was preparing the man at the Censorate end of the channel — Censor Lu Zhongming, her late husband's procedural rival — to receive a version of the An household deaths that suited him. He had begun the laundry. He had begun it without yet knowing she had been in the front court of the An compound at the second drum of the morning, and without yet knowing that the sabao would, at dusk tonight, restore the wick of the gate lamp in front of the kitchen girl, and without yet knowing — by her count — that there were seven embroideries in the gallery and not six, that there had been seven places at the table and not six, that he had brushed the lacquer on the rear of a Bukharan screen with a belt-buckle and a wrist with blood on it.
He would learn these things by tomorrow.
She had perhaps eighteen hours.
She took out the wax tablet, wiped from it the three lines of her count of one hundred, and wrote, in their place, four.
One: Zhang Cong, Eastern Market silk-merchant, second turning west of the north gate, lacquer redone eight days ago.
Two: Zhang Cong sat at the foot of the An table, ate, left through the front court, brushed his belt against the rear of the third screen-panel, bled at his wrist on the front, and carried out of the compound a small object I do not yet know the shape of.
Three: Zhang Cong this morning sealed a guild-letter to Lu Zhongming through the Office of the Western Market.
Four: I will need to be at the Office of the Western Market tomorrow morning at the seventh hour, before the letter can be filed.
She held the tablet to the lamp. The flame caught the wax. The wax curled and the lines vanished. She watched until the bowl was only ash. Then she stood, and she rang the small handbell on the desk — the bell her husband had bought for her in the Eastern Market, in 745, in the lacquer shop one shop east of Zhang Cong's, on the second turning west of the north gate — and Nanny Zhou came in with the small old face that meant Nanny had heard most of the soliloquy through the courtyard wall and had no intention of admitting it.
"Nanny."
"Mistress."
"Send for Brother Hui. Before the noon drum. Tell him I will need him at the An compound tomorrow at the noon drum's third call, with a strong rope, a small flask of eshu oil, a clean linen, and his Sogdian primer."
"Mistress."
"And send word, by the back-lane boy, to Madam Khorshid. Tell her I will come to her at the seventh hour tonight, at her side door, in my grey, without a horse. Tell her — " She paused. She chose. " — tell her I will need her to be sober."
Nanny Zhou's face did the small flat closing-of-shutters movement it did when, in two and a half sentences, Wanjun had reorganised her household's day. Then it composed itself.
"Yes, mistress."
She went. The door closed behind her. The morning, beyond the writing-room, settled into the small ordinary hum of a Chang'an spring forenoon, and the lamp on the desk, which had been lit at the fourth watch and not yet put out, burned in its level small way against the wall.
Wanjun sat down at her desk for the second time. She drew toward her, with the very careful courtesy a woman extends to an object she has not yet earned the right to open, the lacquered letter-box.
She did not open it.
She put her hand flat on the lid, and she sat there, very still, while the morning that had begun in a courtyard of seven dead in a Sogdian house in Liquan Ward came around her like the small high quiet rooms of a memory palace whose corridor she had finally found.
Three weeks ago, her husband had been a name on his own headstone, eighteen months silent, and the lid of the box had been an unopened question. This morning the box was still unopened. The headstone was still in Hexi. But her husband, by the eight characters on a Sogdian kitchen slate and by a name she now had a shape for, had begun, very faintly, to be a witness she could ask a question.
She would ask him, eventually, the question.
She did not, this morning, lift her hand.
The lamp on the desk burned in its level small way. Outside her courtyard, in the long quiet alley that ran behind the houses of Yongchong, the small dry sound of a man clearing his throat — a different man from the man of last night, but a man, and clearing his throat in the way her father's clerks had done in the moments before stepping forward to be noticed — let her know, without her needing to turn her head, that someone had taken up the post the Gold Bird guardsman had abandoned at the fourth watch.
She filed the sound. She added it to the room she kept for sounds of men outside walls.
The room was already crowded.