Chapter Four
The Apartments Behind the Fire
Liquan Ward in the late afternoon had a different smell. The saffron of the morning had been overlaid, by midday, with the close hot odour of charcoal and the thin acrid edge of camel-dung being burned for the atash fire; under the two, where the air thinned in the lane at the back of the spice-row, ran the small unmistakable sweetness of the rendering-pit at the south wall, where the camels' offal was processed for tallow when a beast had to be put down. The pit had been used recently. A camel had died — or been killed — in the last day. She filed the pit.
She had taken the long way west. She had ridden first to Pingkang Ward, dismounted at Madam Khorshid's side door, and stood inside the small private courtyard for the count of forty breaths while Madam Khorshid — barefoot in a linen sleep-tunic, a hot brick still in her hand from the warming-bench, her dark hair loose on her shoulders — listened to her without interruption. Madam Khorshid had been told to be sober. Madam Khorshid had achieved sober. Madam Khorshid had said, at the end of the forty breaths, in her very dry middle voice: Wanjun. The Han silk-shop. The seven doors. I have been there. Once. And then, after a moment: I will tell you tonight, when you come back, what I remember of the seven doors. Go to Liquan. Take Brother Hui's bag from my back hall. I sent for it from him this morning at your nanny's request and it is more practical than mine. The bag was on a peg at the back hall, packed by Brother Hui himself by a runner who would not, Madam Khorshid thought, have given the bag's destination away — Brother Hui did not, in his small narrow life, know more than three people, and the three people he trusted in different parts. Wanjun took the bag. She did not, in Madam Khorshid's courtyard, dismount again. She rode west.
The mare went well in the afternoon. Spring Snow had decided, in the small private way of an eleven-year-old mare with a rider she had known since the mare was three, that the day was a serious day and she would not bolt at a pigeon. The pigeons, in the lane behind the spice-row, were thick as flies on a barrel of pickled cabbage. The mare picked her way through them and did not slow.
The apartments behind the fire-temple were on the temple's south side. The fire-temple of Liquan Ward — the atash-kadeh in Sogdian, the xianci in Tang — was a low square brick building with no windows on its outer walls and a single iron door on its eastern face. The dome over the inner sanctum was tiled in the dark blue of a Bukharan workshop, but the body of the temple was unadorned, in the way of the religion, because the fire and not the architecture was what was meant to be looked at. The apartments behind it were a separate compound, set against the temple's south wall, a small courtyard with three rooms around it; they were the behdin apartments, the lodgings reserved for kin of the dead in the days between the death and the daxma — the cremation, or in the Tang adaptation the burial-platform — which in Sogdian Chang'an custom was at the seventh dawn after the death.
She was admitted at the gate by an old woman in unbleached white. The old woman did not speak. She did not need to. An Naxia was waiting in the courtyard.
He had not changed his clothes. He had not, she thought, slept. He had, however, eaten — there was a small reddened bruise on the inside of his right wrist where, she suspected, the edge of a clay cup had pressed when he had drunk a thick Sogdian millet broth standing up, in a hurry, sometime in the last hour. He had run his hand back through his hair; the hair was tied again. He had bathed his face. He had a long thin line of dried blood at the angle of his jaw where a careless razor in another man's hand had nicked him.
She filed the nick.
"Lady."
"An gongzi."
"My aunt Datis will receive you in the inner room. She has asked that you receive her without your veil and that you come alone. I will be in the courtyard. Aspand is at the gate. The fire-temple priest is in his temple. We will not be heard."
"Datis has decided to speak."
"Datis has decided to listen. Whether she will speak is a thing she has not, before you have sat down, decided."
She inclined her head. She unfastened the small grey gauze veil that the Daoist abbey of Lady Wei Wan had given her against the spring dust of a Chang'an afternoon. She handed it to An Naxia. He took it as a man takes a letter he does not yet have permission to open. He did not put it in his sleeve. He held it.
She crossed the courtyard.
The inner room was small. A single high window admitted late afternoon light from the south side of the apartments; the light fell, through the lattice-shutter, in slow narrow yellow bars across the matted floor. Datis was seated on a low cushion against the north wall, her back straight, her hands folded in her lap, her white mourning robe arranged about her with the careful patience of a woman who had been ill for some years and had learned to compose herself for visitors as her younger self had once composed her own children's beds. She was perhaps fifty. Her hair, under the unbleached headcloth, was iron grey. Her face was the long-boned narrow face of a Sogdian woman of the second generation in Chang'an, with the small inheritance from a Persian mother — the Naxia-line — in the breadth of the brow and the grey of the eyes. The eyes were the grey of her nephew's.
Wanjun stopped at three paces from her, bowed in the half-bow of one lay sister to another, and waited.
"Sit, lady."
Datis spoke Tang in the somewhat slow careful manner of a woman who had not, in the last twenty years, had to speak much of it. There was, under the Tang, a low Sogdian throatedness that made the consonants soft. She gestured at the cushion opposite her. Wanjun sat.
A young Sogdian woman — perhaps the niece-by-marriage who had been mentioned in the customs filings as keeping the household's apothecary book — entered with two small clay cups and a brass pot, set them between the women, and withdrew. The cup at Wanjun's left hand was already half-filled. The drink was a thin clear yellow infusion that smelled of saffron and dried apricot. It was not tea. It was an apricot-leaf decoction used in Sogdian mourning houses as a substitute for tea, because tea — by some old custom Wanjun did not yet know — was held to be inappropriate to a fully-ended hall.
She did not yet drink. Neither did Datis. Both of them sat with their hands folded.
"You are the woman my husband wrote about."
Wanjun inclined her head. "I am Cui Wanjun, of the Cui of Bocheng, widow of Cui Yanzhi who served as a junior censor of the Yushitai. I am, in lay vow, of the abbey of Lady Wei Wan. I do not yet know what your husband wrote about me, lady. I would be grateful to be told."
Datis looked at her for a long moment.
"My husband," she said, "in the second month of this year, sat in this very apartment — at this hour, lady, this very hour of the late afternoon, when I had been ill and had been kept here for two weeks by the priest of the atash — and he told me that he had written, in his ledger of the trade-house, the name of a man with whom he had been having a private accounting which he would, at his death, transfer to me; and that I should, if he died before the spring caravan, send for the man's wife, who he had reason to believe knew matters which her husband had not lived long enough to tell her. He said that the wife was a young woman of a strict father, who had been taught the Tang Code as another woman is taught the Book of Odes, and that she would understand. He said the wife was Cui Wanjun of Yongchong. He said the husband had been Cui Yanzhi who died on the Hexi circuit."
She filed all of it. She felt, in a small distant manner — the way she felt a kettle of water rising to the boil in the kitchen of an inn from three rooms away — that something in her chest had been spoken to without her permission. She did not allow it. She kept her hands folded.
"Your husband, lady. He had known mine."
"He had been in correspondence with him."
"On what subject."
"On the subject," said Datis, "of a Han silk-merchant of the Eastern Market who had been pressing on certain Sogdian trade-houses, including ours, to convey small consignments of uncut Khotanese stone through the spring caravan to a Tibetan agent of unknown principal. Your husband had been investigating the merchant in the months before he was sent to Hexi. He came to my husband, on three occasions in the spring before he left, by night and through the back lane and not by the front gate, because the front gate had been watched. The third time, he stayed perhaps two hours. He left a slip of paper, on which he had written certain names, and which my husband locked in the small cedar cabinet behind my husband's chair in his own counting-room. The cabinet, lady, is in this house in Liquan Ward, locked. The key is in the inner pocket of my husband's mourning robe, which is on his body in the hall, where you have left it. The slip of paper is in the cabinet."
Wanjun did not speak. She let the sentence sit. She watched Datis's face. The face was steady. The hands were folded. The hands had not, throughout the sentence, moved. Datis had rehearsed the sentence; she had rehearsed it with the careful patience of a woman who had been ill for some years and had learned to choose, of the many sentences she could have said, the one that would not need to be repaired.
"You are telling me," said Wanjun, slowly, "that my husband and your husband shared an investigation in the spring of 749."
"Yes."
"And that the slip of paper your husband locked in his cabinet is the slip my husband left with him."
"Yes."
"And that the key to the cabinet is in your husband's robe."
"Yes."
"And that I, lady, would do well, before tomorrow at the noon drum, to enter the hall of your house, take the key from your husband's robe, and unlock the cabinet."
Datis looked at her. The face was steady. The hands were folded. There was, at the very corner of the right eye, the small bright wet beginning of a tear that had been intended for the entire interview and had risen, at this point, of its own accord. Datis did not blink it away. She let it sit.
"I am telling you, lady, that I am too old and too ill to walk back into the hall of my house, and that there is no other woman of my house alive whose right it is to open my husband's robe, and that the cabinet is the matter your husband died for, and that if you do not open it before the noon drum tomorrow it will be opened, by another hand, before the seventh hour of tomorrow afternoon."
She filed the sentence. She did not, with the small filed sentence, allow herself any expression at all.
"Lady."
"Lady Cui."
"You will permit me, in this case, the courtesy of asking you one further question, which I will need to ask you in the form in which I will ask it, and which I will ask you here, in this room, because I will not ask you in your own hall and because I will not ask anyone else."
"Ask."
"Your husband's death by gelsemium, lady. Did your husband know that his wine had been mixed, the night before last."
Datis did not, this time, take a long moment.
"My husband, the night before last, drank the third cup from the porcelain side of the table, lady. The porcelain side was the side of his guest. He drank it not because his guest had handed it to him — he did not — but because, by the convention of his own house, the host pours the second toast from the guest's cup into his own, in the gesture of welcoming the guest's water into the household's well. The convention was old. The convention was — lady — a habit of my husband's, of which the guest had been informed by myself, in the second hour of the afternoon of the day before, in a private letter sent by the same runner who carried the invitation. The guest knew, when he sat down at our table, that my husband would, by the convention, drink from the guest's cup."
Wanjun did not move.
"You wrote the letter."
"I wrote the letter."
"Naming the convention."
"Naming the convention."
"And the wine in the porcelain cups had been prepared, the night before last, by — "
"By my husband's own hand, lady, in his cellar, at the noon hour, with no other hand near. The porcelain cups had not been emptied of the previous night's small libation, which the women of the house had set there at dusk, in the Sogdian habit of leaving a thumb's depth of wine at the bottom of a household cup overnight. The wine of the libation, lady. The wine of the libation."
"Was poisoned."
"Was poisoned."
"By."
"Lady."
"By."
Datis looked at her. The tear, at the corner of the right eye, had now traced a small thin line down her cheek and stopped at the line of the jaw. Datis did not raise her hand to wipe it.
"By my husband's youngest brother's wife, lady, who walked out of the house that night with the cushion of the seventh place rolled in a wash-basket. She did not know — she did not, lady, know — that her husband would drink from the porcelain cup his guest had touched. She believed her husband would die of the wine she had set out for the guest. The guest was not to be poisoned. The guest was to be present, and to be the only living witness, when the household lay dead at the table."
The room, around them, did not change. The yellow bars of light from the high window had moved, in the time of the sentence, perhaps two fingerbreadths down the wall behind Datis's head, in the slow patient way the late afternoon moved on a south-facing room in spring. Wanjun did not move.
She filed every word.
She filed the youngest brother's wife. She filed the cushion in the wash-basket. She filed the guest was not to be poisoned. She filed the only living witness. She filed the slow line of the tear on Datis's cheek, and the small careful steadiness of Datis's folded hands, and the fact that Datis had not, while saying these sentences, allowed her own face to do anything that her husband, dead in the hall in Liquan Ward two streets away, would have been ashamed to have her face do in front of a Daoist nun in a borrowed apartment.
She did not, in the room, allow herself the small sharp insistence of the question how do you know, which was the question her father had taught her to put always, in cases of this shape, immediately after a statement of this shape, because the question separated the witnesses who had been instructed from the witnesses who had observed. Datis had observed. Datis had been here, in this apartment, on the night of the dinner, ill and confined and not at the table; Datis had not seen, with her own eyes, her husband's youngest brother's wife carrying a wash-basket out of the gate; Datis had been told, sometime between the dinner hour and this hour of this afternoon, by someone who had seen the wash-basket. Wanjun did not yet know who. She filed who.
"Lady."
"Lady Cui."
"The youngest brother's wife. Her name."
"Sirin."
"Sirin."
"Yes."
"And Sirin, lady, is in this compound now."
"Sirin," said Datis, "is in the second room of this courtyard. She has been here since the third hour of yesterday afternoon. She has not eaten. She has not slept. She has not spoken since she walked in through the gate. She is twenty-three, lady. She married my husband's youngest brother two years ago. Her father was the senior priest of the atash of Loulan Ward, who died last winter. She is from a poor family. The brother-in-law to whom she was married is, at the table in the hall, the third place along the south side, dead by his own libation."
Wanjun let the sentence pass through her. She did not, for the first time in this case, file it.
She thought, instead — for the small flat second of an inhalation — about a young woman of twenty-three, married two years to a husband whose family had not adopted her into its women's circle in the way Sogdian women were adopted, sitting in a second room of this very courtyard with no food and no sleep and no speech, holding inside her chest the small flat private knowledge that she had set a household cup with the wine that had killed her husband. She thought about Sirin's hands. She had not yet seen Sirin's hands. She would, in a moment, ask whether she could.
"Datis."
"Lady Cui."
"You are telling me what Sirin did. You are not telling me — though I have not asked, and will not, now — why she did it."
"No, lady."
"You know why she did it."
"I know what she was paid. I know what she was promised. I do not know the inner room, lady. I am — what I am, lady, the inner room of a young woman of twenty-three who married, in a season when her father had died and her brothers' wives were not kind to her, the third son of an old Sogdian house, is not yet a room I have permission to enter. I will enter it. By the night of the cremation I will enter it. If you allow me until then. After that, lady, you will hear what I have heard."
"Until the night of the cremation, then."
"Until then."
"Datis."
"Lady."
"I will ask you, only and now, this. The man who paid her. Was he the Han."
"Yes."
"In person."
"Through his clerk. Twice. Sirin's father had been ill in the winter of last year and Sirin had paid for the priest's medicines out of her own dowry; the Han clerk had come, at the end of winter, to the door of her father's apartments behind the Loulan atash, and had offered, in plain Tang, money for a small unimportant favour she would owe him in the spring. The favour was the libation. The money was a single ingot. The clerk, lady — and I tell you this because you will need it; you will not need to ask the question yourself; you will save the half-hour the question would have taken — the clerk was a small narrow man with a wen at the right side of his throat the size of a chestnut, who walked with a slight roll of the left foot from an old injury. He spoke Tang only. He gave his name as Pang. He is, by the testimony of the gate-boy of this compound, a man I have seen at the gate of this compound twice in the last three months, both times bringing a sealed letter for my husband's hand. He is a man, lady Cui, who has been admitted by my husband's gate-boy on the basis that he is — by the gate-boy's understanding — a runner of the Office of the Western Market."
"He is not."
"He is not. The Office of the Western Market sends a junior recorder by name, in the morning, in Office livery, on a fixed routine. Pang has come at the second hour of the afternoon, twice, alone, in plain Tang dress with no livery. He has carried letters from the Han silk-merchant of the Eastern Market to my husband, presented as Office notices. My husband, in the second instance, kept the letter. The letter is in the cedar cabinet in the counting-room."
Wanjun filed Pang. She filed the wen at the right side of the throat. She filed the rolling foot. She filed the false livery. She filed the letter is in the cabinet.
She filed every word.
"Datis."
"Lady."
"I will see Sirin."
"Tomorrow morning, lady. Not now. Sirin will not speak now. She will speak tomorrow morning, when she has eaten, when she has slept, and when she has been allowed to know that I have told you what I have told you."
"Tomorrow morning."
"Yes."
"And the cabinet."
"Tonight. Before the dusk drum. Lady Cui, you must go to my husband's hall, take the key from the inner pocket of his mourning robe, unlock the cabinet, take out the slip of paper your husband left with my husband, and bring it with you, in your sleeve, to this apartment, and burn it in front of me, in the brazier of this courtyard, in the third hour of the evening."
Wanjun looked at her.
"Burn it."
"Burn it."
"Datis, the slip of paper is the entire matter."
"The slip of paper, lady Cui, is the matter of your husband's death and of my husband's death and of the deaths of five more people in the hall of my house. The slip of paper is, also, the matter of the small narrow life of a young woman of twenty-three in the second room of this courtyard, whose father, when she was sixteen, paid the priests of the Loulan atash to register her name in the household-roll of his temple at the rate of a single libation a year for the rest of her life, so that her family might be remembered after he was dead. The slip of paper is, also, the matter of my niece by marriage, who is twenty-five and unmarried and lives in this compound with us, and who has a son of three. The slip of paper, lady, is the matter of every wife and daughter and niece of the An clan in Chang'an, of whom there are, at last count of the customs ledger, forty-nine. I will not, after my husband, have my house burned for a slip of paper. You will read it. You will copy it, lady, in your own hand, in your own mind, into the small private room you keep for it. You will burn the slip. And tomorrow morning, when you walk through the gate of my husband's compound to speak with Sirin in this courtyard, the slip will not be in your sleeve. It will be in your head. Your head, lady, has been described to me by my husband, in the second month of this year, as a place a man could trust a slip of paper to be."
Wanjun absorbed it. She did not, for several breaths, do anything but absorb it. She had been, in the small filed room she kept for it, half-prepared to be asked to do something difficult on Datis's behalf this afternoon. She had not been prepared to be asked, by a Sogdian widow in the late afternoon of the second day of a household's deaths, to take into her own head, by the third hour of this evening, a list of names that had killed at least seven people and to leave no copy of it anywhere outside the bones of her own skull.
She inclined her head.
"Yes."
"Lady Cui."
"Yes."
"You agree."
"I agree. I will read the slip in the counting-room at the eleventh hour of tonight. I will burn it in this courtyard at the third hour of the evening — which would, by the conventional reckoning, be one hour before the dusk drum. Datis, you have given me, in this afternoon, more than I had expected to be given. I will, before I leave Liquan, do you a small additional courtesy."
"Lady."
"I will, when I have walked your husband's hall this evening with the key, walk the second room of this courtyard for the count of one hundred from the corridor side without entering it. I will not speak to Sirin. I will only stand outside her room. I will register, by sound, by silence, by the small things a man's wife by two years and a woman of twenty-three carries in her shoulders, the small additional facts that will be useful to me tomorrow morning. I will not, in the standing, do her any injury. She will not, I think, even know I am there."
Datis looked at her.
"Yes, lady."
"And one further thing."
"Lady."
"I will not, in any conversation with Sirin tomorrow, refer to her father."
Datis closed her eyes for the very small moment in which a woman who has been holding herself in her own hands for an entire conversation allows herself, briefly, to put herself down.
"Thank you, lady Cui."
"Datis."
"Lady."
"I am sorry for your dead."
Datis opened her eyes again.
"Lady Cui," she said, very simply. "I am sorry for yours."
Wanjun stood. She bowed. She turned, in the small careful Tang manner, and walked out into the courtyard.
An Naxia was at the small low door of the second room. He was not at the door of his aunt's room. He was at Sirin's. He had been at Sirin's, she realised, for the entire interview, in the small unobtrusive way of a man who had been keeping a watch on a young woman of his clan as her elder kin had decided what to do about her. He had not gone in. He had stood, with his back to the wall, in the late afternoon shadow, his hand at his side. The hand was still, she thought, riding a fraction higher than the other.
He looked up when she came out.
"Lady."
"An gongzi."
"My aunt told you."
"Yes."
"She told you Sirin."
"Yes."
"She told you about the cabinet."
"Yes."
"She told you about the letter."
"Yes."
"Lady — "
"An gongzi."
"Lady, my aunt is — "
"Your aunt is, an gongzi, the woman I have heard. I will go now to your uncle's hall. I will, before the dusk drum, do the things she has asked. You may, if you wish, walk with me as far as the gate of this courtyard. From the gate to the hall I will walk alone, with the sabao's deputy. He will admit me. He will not enter. You will not enter. You will sit in this courtyard, beside the door of the second room, for the time I am gone. I have promised your aunt I will, on my return, walk the corridor outside the second room for the count of one hundred without speaking. After that I will return to her, and I will burn what I am to burn, and then I will ride back through the inner street of Liquan to the ward gate."
He listened.
"You will not, in this afternoon," he said, slowly, "let me into the hall."
"I will not, this afternoon, let anyone into the hall. Your aunt requested. I will keep her promise."
"Lady Cui."
"An gongzi."
He looked at her. The grey eyes did not change. There was, however, in the small careful unmoving line of his mouth, the smallest possible adjustment of expression — perhaps the corner of the upper lip, perhaps not — which she read as the small inward acknowledgement of a man who had been told, by a woman two years his junior, what he might and might not do in his own uncle's house, in the day of his uncle's death, and who had decided, with the careful inward dignity of a man whose dignity was older than her authority, to obey her.
"Yes, lady."
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow."
"At the noon drum's third call, in your uncle's compound, with Brother Hui. With your aunt's permission, with Sirin's silence or her speech, whichever she gives, in the apartments behind the fire-temple after."
"Yes."
"An gongzi."
"Lady."
"Your sister. An Bibi."
He looked at her. She felt the small inward adjustment again, less small this time. He did not, however, refuse the question.
"My sister An Bibi," he said, "was married, two years ago, into the household of An Lushan, who is a general of the northern frontier and whom you have probably heard your husband and my husband mention in their letters in the spring of last year. My sister, lady, by the standing custom of the An clan, is the young woman of our house who would be named in the second letter — the letter that would have come with the fourth consignment of stone — by the principal who is using my sister's name as a courtesy to my uncle. I am telling you my sister's name because, by tomorrow, you will need to know it. You will not, by tomorrow, need to know what I know about my sister's husband's house, which is the part I am not telling you and which I will tell you at some later moment of my own choosing. I am telling you my sister's name because, if it is named in any document of this case, in any letter delivered to any office of the city, by anyone, you will know — before the morning of the day it is delivered — that the principal I will not yet name has begun to move pieces I have not yet seen him move."
She filed it. She filed the sister. She filed An Lushan. She filed the principal I will not yet name.
She filed it without — for the very small flat second she allowed herself — looking him in the eye.
"Thank you, an gongzi."
"Lady Cui."
She walked, alone, to the gate of the courtyard. Aspand was there, in his dark tunic. He bowed. He opened the gate to her without asking and walked beside her, three paces ahead, through the alley behind the fire-temple to the back gate of the An compound.
The back gate of the An compound was small and low and unpainted. It opened onto the kitchen yard, where the well still smiled at her. The well was, this afternoon, exactly as it had been in the morning. The morning's naasalar chant was over. The house was very quiet. The wick had not yet been replaced at the threshold lamp; it would not be replaced, by An Naxia's instruction to the sabao, until dusk. The hall, when she entered it, was nearly dark; the high small windows had been shuttered against the afternoon to keep the sun off the bodies, and the floor of reed mats had begun, under the long shut hall, to take on the faint specific smell of bodies on the second day, which was a smell she had not yet, in eighteen months, smelled but had read about, in the same small precise detail, in three customs filings on caravan disasters.
She crossed to the patriarch's place at the east end of the table. She did not, this afternoon, look at the faces. She knelt beside the patriarch.
The patriarch's mourning robe — the same dark plum-brown of the gate lacquer, the robe in which a Sogdian patriarch was put down at his last meal — had an inner pocket on the left side, at the height of the kidney, in the Bukharan tailor's habit. She slid her hand through the inner sleeve to the inner pocket. The body was cold and slack and not yet stiff. She did not, in the small flat private way she had filed for it, allow herself to register the texture of him. She located the key. She drew it out. It was a small brass key, the bow of it formed in the shape of a Bukharan pomegranate.
She stood. She walked across the hall to the door at the western end which opened, by the customs map, into the elder An's counting-room.
The counting-room was a small windowless brick room behind the hall, lit, when she opened the door, by no lamp; the air inside was close and cool and smelled of paper and old ink and the faint resinous note of the gelsemium, which had been brought through this room at some hour two nights ago, on its way to the cellar. She unbarred the lamp she had brought from her sleeve and struck a small fire-stick. She lit the lamp. The lamp showed her the counting-room: a low desk, a high stool, a wall of locked boxes, and against the south wall, behind where the elder An's chair would have been, the small cedar cabinet.
The cabinet was the size of a child's cradle and twice as deep, with three drawers and, above them, a small lockable cupboard. The lock was on the cupboard. The brass key fitted it. She turned the key. The cupboard opened.
Inside the cupboard were four objects.
The first was a small Sogdian household ledger, bound in dark green silk, which she did not, this evening, take out — she would not have time to read it before the dusk drum, and Datis had given her the slip alone to memorise. The second was a small folded letter, unsealed, in Tang characters on the back of which was written, in a neat junior censor's hand she would have known in any market in the world, the single Tang character 藏 — conceal. Her husband's hand. She did not, this evening, open the letter. She filed the location. She would, tomorrow, read it.
The third was the slip of paper.
It was a strip of thin Hexi paper, perhaps four inches long and one wide, folded twice. She unfolded it. Her husband had written on it, in his own hand, in the careful sloping cursive she had loved more than any other hand in her life, eleven characters.
She read them.
She read them again, by the light of the lamp.
She held the slip to the lamp for the count of ten breaths, and committed each character to the small private room she kept for the lines a woman could not afford to write down. She read them a third time, for the fixing. She copied them, in her head, into the inner wall of the small room. She closed the door of the small room. She put a stone in front of it.
Then, with the steadiness of a hand which had been trained for this, she held the slip to the lamp.
It caught and curled and turned to soft black flakes in the small brass bowl she had carried in her sleeve for the purpose. She watched until the last edge had gone, and the lamp had eaten the last of it, and the bowl was only ash.
The fourth object in the cupboard was, behind the slip, a small dark velvet pouch. She lifted it. Inside the pouch was a single ingot of silver, perhaps the weight of two of her own fingers. The ingot was stamped on its face with the standing crane-and-tower seal of the fanyang garrison of the northern frontier — An Lushan's command. The reverse was stamped with a small private mark she did not, at the moment of unfolding the pouch, recognise — a stylised three-pronged gear of the kind used by Tang official kilns on their seal-mark on porcelain. She filed the mark. She did not, at this hour, in this room, in this house, allow herself to know it. She would know it tomorrow.
She put the silver back in the pouch. She put the pouch back in the cupboard. She locked the cupboard. She kept the key.
She stood in the counting-room with the lamp in her hand, for the count of three breaths, and looked at the wall on which the lamp's small light made the close brick walls of her late father-in-law's de facto private archive into a small high room she now knew.
The eleven characters her husband had written on the slip were, in the order in which he had written them — and her memory was perfectly faithful, and she did not, in the closed room of her head, alter them by a stroke — these:
张琮东市. 杨为父. 我已知, 勿独. 长安.
Zhang Cong of the Eastern Market. Yang is the father. I have known. Do not be alone. Chang'an.
She did not, in the counting-room, in the second of her late husband's compounds she would enter in eighteen months, allow herself to do anything about the seven characters in the middle. She filed them. She closed the door of the small room. She put two stones in front of it. She blew out the lamp.
She walked back through the hall, not looking at the table.
She walked across the kitchen yard, the well smiling at her in the late light, the kitchen girl absent, the gate-boy not yet at the back gate. She gave the key, at the back gate, to Aspand. Aspand took it without comment, in his dark tunic, his face the careful flat Tang-frontier face it had been at the dawn gate. She walked back through the alley behind the fire-temple to the courtyard of the apartments.
An Naxia was at the corridor outside the second room. He did not move when she came in. He nodded, once. She nodded once back. He stepped two paces to her left, into the shadow under the south eave, and gave her, by the standing still in the shadow, the corridor.
She walked the corridor.
The corridor outside Sirin's room was four paces long. Wanjun walked it three times slowly, with the small precise courtesy of a Daoist nun who had not yet entered a room. She did not look in. The door of the second room was closed. There was, at the door's lower hinge, a small white linen rag — a household rag, of the kind a Sogdian woman placed at a threshold when she did not wish to be addressed even by the women of her own house. Wanjun registered the rag. She filed the rag. She did not knock.
She listened.
From inside the second room came no sound. There was, however — beneath the absence — a small slow pattern of breathing, the breathing of a young woman whose lungs were not, at the moment, ill, but were the lungs of a woman who had been weeping for hours, in a controlled small way, and had eventually stopped weeping and was now, in the late afternoon, sitting upright with her hands folded and was breathing in the way the body breathed when the body had been emptied of weeping but had not yet been given anything else to do.
Wanjun did not, for the count of one hundred, do anything but listen to Sirin's breathing.
At the count of one hundred — she counted, again, by the small slow opening and closing of her hands in her sleeves — she filed the breathing. She turned. She walked back across the courtyard. She did not look at An Naxia. She did not need to.
The brazier in the centre of the courtyard had been lit by the niece-by-marriage in the time Wanjun had been in the hall. The coals were low and very red. Datis sat on her cushion, on her side of the brazier, with the small steady composure of a woman who had given a slip of paper into another woman's head and was now waiting, with patience, to see the head leave her house.
Wanjun knelt at the brazier. She held her open palm above the coals for the half-second she required to feel the heat of them against the skin. Then she opened the brass bowl from her sleeve and tipped the soft black flakes of the burned slip into the heart of the coals.
The flakes vanished.
The coals shifted. A small fine column of grey ash rose from them, perhaps the height of a thumb, and dispersed in the late afternoon air of the courtyard.
Datis bowed her head, very slightly.
Wanjun stood. She gave the brass bowl back to her sleeve. She walked, in the late afternoon light, to the gate of the courtyard. An Naxia was again at the gate. He had her grey veil in his hand. He returned it. She fastened it. He bowed.
"Lady."
"An gongzi."
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow."
She walked through the gate.
The mare was at the alley, with the boy. He gave her a leg up. She settled herself.
She did not, in the alley behind the fire-temple, look back at the apartments.
She rode east, in the slow patient walk of a woman in no hurry.
*
She came to Pingkang Ward at the sixth hour and a half of the evening, by which time the lanterns of the wineshops had begun to glow in the dusk-pale air and the foreign girls — Sogdians and Persians and one or two from further west — had begun to lean from the painted balconies in the small idle way they used as advertisement. She did not ride down the main lane. She turned at the second turning and dismounted, this time, at the side door of the House of the Cool Vine, in the long shadow of the courtyard wall. The boy took the mare. Madam Khorshid was waiting at the side door in her sober afternoon clothes — dark Persian wool, a high-necked tunic, the gauze veil of the older Persian women, not the brighter dress of a Pingkang night.
"Wanjun."
"Khorshid."
"Inside."
She went in.
The private parlour of the House of the Cool Vine was a small high-ceilinged room at the back of the courtyard, walled with cedar and floored with a thick Persian carpet that Madam Khorshid had brought, twenty-seven years ago, in the bottom of a chest, from Khorasan. There were two cushions, a low brass tray, and a single small candle in the corner. There was no wine. Madam Khorshid had, at Wanjun's request that morning, achieved sober, and had decided, in the afternoon, to remain there.
She sat. Wanjun sat opposite her.
"You went to the cabinet."
"Yes."
"You burned the slip."
"Yes."
"You read it first."
"Yes."
Madam Khorshid did not ask her what was on it. Madam Khorshid was a Persian woman of forty-one who had bought her own contract at twenty-eight and had spent the intervening thirteen years building an intelligence house in the largest city the world had built; she knew, in the small precise idiom of her trade, when not to ask. She poured Wanjun a small cup of warm goat's-milk tea, which Wanjun did not drink immediately.
"Khorshid."
"Wanjun."
"The seven doors."
"Yes."
"You said this morning you had been there."
"Once."
"How."
"I was taken there, six years ago, by a Persian silk-broker I had then a friendship with, who told me — by way of a piece of professional courtesy he afterward regretted — that the Han silk-merchant of the Eastern Market kept, in the room behind the seventh door, a small porcelain cup that had been broken once and mended with gold lacquer in the Han style. The cup was the cup of his patron, who had given it to him in payment for a service the silk-broker did not name. The patron's name, Wanjun, was not given to me at the time and I did not ask. I have, however, since seen the cup again — on a tray in another room, in a household whose name I will give you, in a moment, in a sentence I will pronounce only once."
Wanjun did not move.
"The cup."
"The cup was the matched second cup of a pair, the first of which was a presentation gift, in 743 by the imperial workshop of the Daming kilns, to the Chancellor's office."
"To Li Linfu."
"To Li Linfu, who is the present chancellor. The presentation pair, by the workshop register, was a gift in 743 from the Yang family of Hua Yin to the chancellor. The Yang family of Hua Yin is the family — Wanjun, you will know this in a moment, before I say it — of Yang Guifei, who became the Imperial Consort in 745. The Yang family of Hua Yin includes a young cousin, in 743 a court librarian, who was given the matched second of the presentation pair by the chancellor as a counter-gift in the autumn of 743. The young cousin's name, Wanjun, is Yang Guozhong, who is now the Vice-President of the Department of Imperial Sacrifices. He is, this year, rising. He is, this year, the cousin of the Imperial Consort, and the secondary patron — by my own private accounting which you will not repeat — of the Han silk-merchant of the Eastern Market whose lacquer was redone eight days ago. The Han silk-merchant, Wanjun, is not the principal. The Han silk-merchant is the broker. The cup in his room behind the seventh door is the gift of the principal, who is the cousin Yang."
Wanjun did not move. She had, in the small filed room of her head, the seven characters of the middle of her husband's slip already on the inner wall. She did not, in Madam Khorshid's parlour, at the half of the sixth hour of the evening, allow the small filed room to be unstacked.
"Khorshid."
"Wanjun."
"You are telling me."
"I am telling you that the seven doors are the doors of a broker who has, since 743, been the broker of a principal whose name you will not, by my advice and by your husband's letter, write down in any room until you have decided you have a household that can survive the writing. I am telling you, Wanjun, that the principal is not, today, the killer. The killer is the broker. The principal is the man behind the broker; the principal, this year, is patient; the principal, this year, is rising. You will not, this year, deal with the principal. You will deal with the broker. You will, this year, do for the broker what your husband did not live long enough to do, and you will, in the doing, register the principal at the edge of your eye and you will not — Wanjun — turn your head."
"I will not turn my head."
"You will not turn your head."
"Khorshid."
"Wanjun."
"And the cup."
"The cup, my dear, is in the room behind the seventh door. The broker keeps it there because the broker is, in his small narrow way, vain. The cup is the proof of the principal. The broker cannot move the cup without insulting the principal. The cup is, this year, a thing that will, when the broker is taken alive into the Censorate, be in the room when the room is opened by an officer of the court. The cup is, this year, the matter the principal will be most embarrassed by, and is, this year, the matter that may keep the principal off your back through the spring and the summer and into the autumn, by which time" — and here Madam Khorshid took, for the first time in the conversation, a small slow sip of her own tea — "you will have, my dear, the rest of your life to consider."
Wanjun, very slowly, took a small slow sip of her own tea. The tea was warm and milky and unsweetened. She let the warmth settle in her throat.
"Khorshid."
"Wanjun."
"My husband, in his letter, knew the principal."
"Wanjun, your husband, in his letter — which you have not yet shown me but which by your own face you have today read — knew both the broker and the principal. He died, my dear, for knowing the principal. He died, technically, of the broker. He did not, my dear, leave you alone."
"He did not, in his slip, leave me alone."
"He did not."
Wanjun sat for a moment with the small steady warmth of the tea in her throat and the small steady ache, somewhere lower, which she had, with the careful discipline of eighteen months, kept in the small filed room she kept for it, and which she would not, this evening, allow.
She filed the ache.
"Khorshid."
"Wanjun."
"I will, tomorrow, go to the cabinet a second time, for the letter beneath the slip."
"Yes."
"And the day after, I will need you to come with me — in your sober dress, in the late afternoon — to the apartments behind the fire-temple in Liquan, to sit with the young woman Sirin, whom I will not, my dear, sit with alone."
"Yes."
"And the night after, Khorshid, I will need to walk past the seven doors of Zhang Cong, in the second turning west of the Eastern Market north gate."
"You will not walk past, Wanjun."
"I will walk past."
"Wanjun, you will not walk past."
"Khorshid."
"Wanjun."
"I will walk past."
Madam Khorshid set down her cup with the very small precise click that meant the conversation, in her opinion, had ended for the present. She looked at Wanjun with the long Persian look that meant, in their long acquaintance, that Madam Khorshid had decided not to argue the present sentence and had filed it for revision in another sentence on another evening.
"You will walk past," she agreed, "with a Persian huji on each arm and a Sogdian poet behind you, in the seventh hour of an evening you have not yet chosen. Not tomorrow. After the dusk drum on a night I will tell you. You will not, my dear, walk past alone in your grey. I will not have it."
"After the dusk drum."
"After the dusk drum."
"With your Persian on each arm."
"With my Persian on each arm."
"Khorshid."
"Wanjun."
"Yes."
Madam Khorshid permitted herself the very smallest of smiles. The smile was the small careful Persian smile of a woman who had, by long acquaintance with a younger woman, learned the long quiet art of giving up the argument she had won at the moment she had won it.
*
She rode home through Pingkang at the seventh hour. The lanterns were full lit. The avenues, on the great avenue beyond Pingkang, were beginning to empty. A Gold Bird patrol passed her at Vermilion-Bird Avenue and the leader of the patrol — a different captain, a younger man, with the smaller crest of a recent appointment — looked at her grey and did not slow. She came to Yongchong at the eighth hour. The bar of the gate was up; Nanny Zhou had left it up for her.
Nanny Zhou was at the kitchen door with the small face of a woman who had been awake too long. There was a thin trail of millet flour on her left wrist, which meant she had been baking against grief, which meant she had been worried.
Wanjun did not, in the courtyard, comment on the baking. She crossed to the writing-room. She lit the lamp. She did not eat.
She sat down at the writing-desk.
The lacquered letter-box sat on the writing-desk where it had sat for eighteen months. Its small red plum-blossom inset was, in the lamp's pale light, the small fruit red her husband had liked. The Pingkang red. The colour of a fan held shut.
She put her hand flat on the lid.
She did not, this evening, lift it.
She thought, very still, of the eleven characters her husband had written six months before he had died. The seven characters in the middle she had memorised. The four characters on the outside — Zhang Cong of the Eastern Market and Chang'an — she had memorised too. Her husband had given her, by way of Datis and by way of the cedar cabinet and by way of the small cold body in the dark hall in Liquan Ward, the names she would have needed eighteen months ago in the small dawn drum's eighth call of the morning he had ridden out for Hexi. He had not given them to her then. He had given them to her now.
She had — for the small flat second she allowed herself — the small high private feeling of having been, for eighteen months, sent late to her own husband's hand, and of arriving, this evening, with the small precise courtesy of a woman who had remembered, all along, the address.
Then she filed the feeling. She closed the small filed room. She put a stone in front of it. She lifted her hand from the lid of the box.
She did not open the box.
She would open the box tomorrow, after she had read the letter beneath the slip in the cedar cabinet in the dead man's counting-room. She would open the box in the order in which her husband had laid the trail. He had laid the trail through Datis, through the cabinet, through the slip, through the letter beneath the slip, through the small velvet pouch and the silver ingot stamped with the fanyang mark and the stylised three-pronged gear she did not yet know. He had laid the trail this carefully because he had known — known, six months before his death — that he would not be the one to walk it. He had laid the trail so that the woman who walked it, with her own particular gift and her own particular discipline, would arrive in the order he had intended.
She would, in the order he had intended, walk.
She blew out the lamp.
In the courtyard the dusk drum began, somewhere across the city, its slow final call. The bar of the gate dropped, in Nanny Zhou's hand, into its iron cradle. The lane outside, before the second of the dusk-drums had sounded its second beat, gave a small dry sound she had been listening for all afternoon — a man clearing his throat, in the manner of a man taking up a post, in the place where a Gold Bird guardsman had stood the night before.
She sat in the dark courtyard for a moment, and she did not, this evening, decide what she would do about him.
She filed the sound.
A house with the doors closed too long becomes a tomb, she thought.
She had, this afternoon and evening, opened five doors: Datis's, the counting-room's, the cabinet's, the slip's, Madam Khorshid's. She had not opened the lacquered box. She had not opened Sirin's. She had not, at the corner of her eye, opened the door whose name she had stored at the inner wall of the small filed room of her head.
She would.
She went to her sleeping-room. She lay on her bed in her grey. She did not sleep. She thought, with the small careful patience she had, in eighteen months, almost learned, about the rooms she would walk tomorrow, beginning with the counting-room and ending with a young woman who had carried a cushion in a wash-basket out of a Sogdian gate at the eleventh hour of the night before last, and she counted, in her head, the seven characters her husband had written in the middle of his slip, and she let them rest, against the inner wall of the small filed room, in the order in which he had set them.
She did not, in the room of names, light a lamp.
The drum tower, four hours away, finished its dusk call. Yongchong dropped, behind its closed gates, into the small final quiet of a Chang'an spring night. Outside her wall, in the lane, the throat-clearer settled in for his watch.
She closed her eyes.
She waited for the morning.