Chapter Five
Brother Hui Goes Down the Well
Brother Hui arrived at her gate at the half of the eighth hour of the morning, on a small grey donkey he had borrowed from a Buddhist nun in the southern wards, with his old leather jiabei satchel across his shoulder and a coil of new hemp rope across the donkey's withers. He was thirty-six. He had been a Buddhist Chan monk at the Da Ci'en monastery until, four years ago, the abbot had caught him selling forged ordination certificates to draft-dodgers; he had been flogged on the bare back at the monastery gate, defrocked, and turned out into the southern wards with no kasaya, no bowl, and one sandal. He had walked to the unused brick kiln at the edge of Anhua Ward, where in the years since he had set up the small life of a man whose literacy was now his only marketable thing. He read Sanskrit, Pahlavi, Tibetan, and a serviceable Khotanese. He smelled of old incense and unwashed cotton. He had the chant voice of a man whose lungs had been trained at the age of eight, and he never deployed it on purpose; when he did, by accident, deploy it, even the dogs of the southern wards stopped to listen.
He dismounted at her gate without dropping the rope.
"Sister Cui."
"Brother Hui."
"You sent for me."
"I sent for you. Have you eaten."
"At the fourth watch. With a man who pays me to read his Pahlavi correspondence with a Persian wine-broker in Liangzhou. The man eats badly. I do not propose to eat again until the dusk drum."
"Then you will eat at the An compound at the eleventh hour, with the kitchen girl, in the kitchen, in the Sogdian household-mourning custom which holds that a stranger of any sect may take bread with the kitchen on the second day to break the bad spell of the first."
"I shall hold the bad spell at the door of my throat. The bread, I will eat."
He spoke Tang in the long careful sentences of a man who had learned it in a monastery instead of a market, with the slight Buddhist scholasticism that meant every clause was a footnote to the previous clause. He was, in his way, an extremely intelligent man pretending to be a slightly stupid man pretending to be an extremely intelligent man. Wanjun had known him by reputation for two years and in person for one, and had decided, in the third hour of their first meeting, that he was the only forensic mind in the southern wards she would risk losing a case to. He had decided, in the same third hour, that she was the only person in Chang'an who had not, on first acquaintance, asked him about the flogging. They had then, by mutual silent agreement, never mentioned it.
She mounted the mare; he mounted the donkey; they rode west.
*
The An compound at the eleventh hour of the morning had changed.
The threshold lamp burned. It had been lit at dusk yesterday from the brand of the fire-temple by the sabao in front of the kitchen girl, as she had instructed; the wick was new white cotton, and the flame was small and clean and stood very straight in the windless air of the alley. The Bukharan screen had been moved. It was no longer in the centre of the front court; it had been carried to the gallery's east arcade and set against the wall, in the small precise relocation Sogdian households used for a de facto shrine-screen in the days before a naasalar had been called. The smear was still on the third panel; she had instructed Aspand last night, through An Naxia, that the smear was not to be wiped until she had stood Brother Hui in front of it. The flagstone beneath was empty. The sweep was still visible — the slight irregular roughness of a flagstone that had been swept by a new household broom and had not yet been walked back across by the daily small grit of a working compound.
Brother Hui stood in front of the screen for the count of perhaps twenty breaths. He did not speak. He looked at the smear. He looked at the flagstone. He bent. He stayed bent. He looked at the rear of the panel.
He straightened.
"Sister Cui."
"Brother Hui."
"He is a Han man. He has been here before. He stood behind the screen, in the front court, while the people at the table were dying. He is missing the lower segment of his right little finger, by the angle of the drip. The dust on the flagstone is from a new household broom which is — if your kitchen girl is to be trusted — the broom kept in the back-yard hutch with the camel-tack. The broom is brought into the front court only on the first day of the spring rites. The broom is brought into the front court this morning not because it is the day of the spring rites but because the lady of the house has been told to use it for the sweep at the screen. I would invite you to consider why."
She filed it. She filed missing the lower segment of his right little finger. She had — she now realised — filed in her own count of one hundred yesterday the small specific shape of the streak of the wrist, but had not, in the morning, thought yet about the implied fingers. Brother Hui, in his slow careful Buddhist clauses, had thought about them in twenty breaths.
She filed Brother Hui's twenty breaths.
"Brother Hui."
"Sister Cui."
"Tell me your second observation, in the order in which you wish to be useful."
"The lady of the house — your sabao's aunt by marriage, the woman who is in the apartments behind the fire-temple — has been told to use the broom from the back-yard hutch because the broom that ordinarily lives in the front court is missing. The broom that ordinarily lives in the front court is missing because, by your kitchen girl's account when I have asked her in the kitchen in the next ten minutes, the broom was used to sweep the screen at the eleventh hour of the night before last and was then taken out of the compound by the youngest brother's wife in a wash-basket together with the cushion of the seventh place. The broom, sister Cui, is not, in the basket, with the cushion. The broom is elsewhere. The broom is, by my private estimate, the second of the three objects the bleeding man carried out of this compound. The first object you have already identified. The third object I will identify for you within an hour, at the well."
She had not, in eighteen months, met a man who, in his second sentence of the morning, had identified an object she had not yet known to look for. She filed Brother Hui's third object. She did not, in front of An Naxia, allow herself to smile.
"Then to the kitchen," she said. "After which, to the well."
*
The kitchen of the An compound was a long narrow brick room running the length of the south wall, with a low rounded oven of the Sogdian tanur type at its eastern end and a long brick worktop running the length of the north wall. Three iron cooking-pans of different sizes hung on hooks above the worktop. A row of stoneware jars stood on a low shelf along the south wall: oil, salt, rice flour, millet flour, dried apricot, and, at the western end, a jar of cellar coriander whose green tops were still — she registered — uncut, because the coriander on the dinner table had been cut from a different cellar dish.
The kitchen girl was at the worktop with the niece-by-marriage. She had been told, by Aspand, that the Daoist nun would come at the eleventh hour of the morning and would bring with her a brother of the southern wards who would eat bread in the household-mourning custom. The kitchen girl had laid out, on a small clay plate, a single round of yesterday's non, broken into three pieces, and a small cup of buttermilk. She had laid them out in the precise small triangular arrangement Sogdian households used for the second day, with the cup at the apex and the bread at the two base corners.
The kitchen girl was about fourteen.
She had a small narrow Sogdian face, the long-boned narrowness of the eastern Sogdian — Kang-clan stock, by the line of the brow — and the careful precise composure of a girl who had been the eldest of several younger sisters and had been hiring herself out to Sogdian households for piece-work since she was nine. She wore the unbleached cotton of household mourning, but with a small bright red braid in the back-hair under the headcloth — the small private mark, in a kitchen girl her age, of a child who had not yet decided that adulthood required the abandonment of red. She did not look up when they entered.
Brother Hui set down his bag, sat on the floor with his back against the low oven, picked up one piece of non, and broke it once more — into a smaller half, which he laid on the clay plate, and a thin curved sliver, which he put in his own mouth — and chewed in the slow careful Buddhist way of a man eating someone else's bread. He swallowed. He held the curved sliver between his teeth and his cheek in the manner of a man who was, in his slow careful Buddhist way, performing the courtesy of taking a meal without rushing it.
"Daughter."
The kitchen girl did not look up.
"Daughter, in the Buddhist household-mourning custom, the kitchen of the dead has the right to be silent for as many days as the kitchen requires. I will not, daughter, ask you anything. I will, however, observe — in the soliloquy form of a censor who has not given an order — three things. I will observe that the broom of this front court is not in its place. I will observe that the new broom, which has been brought from the camel-yard, has been brought in this morning. I will observe that the broom of this front court was carried out of the gate the night before last in a wash-basket, with a household cushion, by a young woman of this house. I will observe these things to the air. The kitchen, daughter, may keep its silence."
He chewed his sliver.
The kitchen girl did not look up.
She did, however, after the third observation, allow her hands — which had been rolling out the bread for the household's afternoon meal — to stop. She kept them on the dough. She did not press. She did not lift them away. She simply stopped them.
Wanjun stepped to the worktop and stood beside her. She did not speak. She did not look at the girl. She picked up the small wooden roller the girl had been using, examined the carved end of it in the small idle manner of a woman comparing kitchen tools, and set it down at the corner of the worktop in such a way that the carved end faced the girl. She had carried it, perhaps, four breaths.
The kitchen girl, with the same slow care she had brought to laying out the bread on the clay plate, took her hands off the dough, picked up the roller without looking at Wanjun, set it back at the centre of the worktop with the carved end facing the south wall — which was, Wanjun thought, the customary direction in this kitchen — and then, without turning her head, said in a quiet hoarse Tang of perhaps eight characters:
"The broom is in the well."
Brother Hui did not move. Wanjun did not move.
"And the cushion."
"In the basket. In the alley behind the temple. In the rubbish, lady. I will fetch it for you after the noon drum."
"And the basket."
"Beneath the cushion in the basket, lady. He gave it to the lady in the front court at the eleventh hour. He had carried it under his coat, lady. It was small. It was a small thing."
"The lady."
"Lady Sirin, lady. She did not know what it was. She did not look. He told her, lady, to carry it out of the house with the broom on top and the cushion under it and to bury all three of them, lady, in the rubbish at the back of the temple. He told her, lady, that if she did this she would be paid the second half of her money, and that if she did not, the priest of the atash of Loulan would lose his stipend in the autumn. She did this, lady."
"The small thing under the cushion. What was the small thing."
"I do not know, lady. I did not look. Lady, I am — lady, I am the kitchen of this house. The cushion is in the basket. The basket is in the rubbish. I will fetch it for you at the noon drum, lady. I will fetch it now if you say to."
"At the noon drum," said Wanjun. "Daughter."
"Lady."
"Your name."
"Mowei, lady."
"Mowei."
"Yes, lady."
"You have done the kitchen no injury. You have done no injury to the lady Sirin. You have done no injury to the lady Datis. You have, this morning, done a great courtesy to the sabao of this market and to a Daoist nun who will remember it. You will, at the noon drum, fetch the basket. You will, after the noon drum, eat in your kitchen with Brother Hui, who will, in the second hour of the afternoon, ask you no questions but will, in the third hour, ask you three things to which you will give him whatever answer you choose. You will then, in the fourth hour of the afternoon, walk with the lady Datis from the apartments behind the temple back to your kitchen, and you will sit, daughter, at this worktop in the small ordinary way of a kitchen girl at a worktop, and the household will, in this small way, begin again."
Mowei did not look up.
"Yes, lady."
Wanjun stepped back from the worktop. Brother Hui stood, very slowly, in the small careful way of a man whose left knee was bad. He bowed in the half-bow Buddhist clerics gave to women of equivalent religious rank.
"Daughter, the bread is good."
"Brother."
"It is."
They went out through the kitchen door, into the kitchen yard.
*
The well was where it had been.
It still smiled. The small clean curve of bared brick on the southern arc of the mossed rim was, in the brighter light of mid-morning, less of a smile and more of a thin pale crescent — the pale of brick that had been freshly scraped and the dark of moss that had been pushed aside by a rope's friction. The cover of the well was still on. The cover was a low wooden plank, plain, weighted at its centre by a small stone the size of a fist. The stone was not, she thought, original to the well. The stone had a small chipped corner that matched, exactly, the empty notch in the south rim of the well's brick cap. The stone had been broken off the cap and laid on the cover as a weight. Someone, in the last forty-eight hours, had had the small careful idea of weighting the cover with a piece of the well itself.
She filed the stone.
Brother Hui took the rope from his shoulder. He unrolled it. He examined the well-rim's pale crescent for half a breath, and the cover, and the stone, and the cellar door at the south wall of the yard, which led, by the customs map of the compound, down into the spice-warehouse cellar that connected, by an old Tang sewer-plan she had read in 745, to the ward's trunk drain.
"Sister Cui."
"Brother Hui."
"The well drops about three zhang. The shaft is brick lined to about half its depth and unlined below. The water table here is at about two zhang and a fingerwidth. There will be water at the bottom. The broom, if it is in the well, is in the water. The broom will float. The broom will not be at the bottom of the well. The broom will be lodged at the side of the shaft, at the water line, where the shaft is widest. If your kitchen girl is to be trusted, the broom will be on the south side, because the rope-scrape is on the south rim and the man who dropped it would have dropped it on the side opposite himself."
"You believe the kitchen girl."
"I believe the kitchen girl exactly as far as the broom. I do not yet believe her about the basket. I will believe her about the basket when she has been to the rubbish at the back of the temple and back."
"Yes."
"Then I will go down."
He stripped off his patched cotton outer-robe and laid it on the kitchen worktop, where Mowei without comment moved her dough plate over to make room. He kept on his under-robe and his thin patched cotton trousers. He removed his sandals. He stood, at the edge of the well-cap, in his bare feet, in his under-robe, in the late spring sun. His bare back was — she allowed herself the very small flat second of registering — heavily scarred at the right shoulder-blade and across the lower lumbar, in the long narrow specific pattern of the bamboo flogging-rod of the Buddhist tribunal. The scars were old. She filed nothing about them.
He tied the rope, in three quick competent half-hitches, to the iron camel-tie at the kitchen door. Aspand had come in from the front court to hold the line. Aspand did not speak; he took the rope across his palm and braced his right foot against the doorframe with the calm small competence of a man who had been hauling other men out of wells, in this and other Sogdian compounds, since he had been twelve. Brother Hui set the bag down beside the well-cap, drew from it a small wide-mouthed brass lamp on a long bent wire, lit the lamp from a flint, and let it down by the wire to the depth at which the shaft widened.
He looked into the well.
He held the lamp there for a count of perhaps six breaths.
"The broom is there. South side of the shaft. Wedged against the brick at the join of the lining and the unlined wall. There is also a piece of broken porcelain at the rim. There is also" — he paused — "a small dark object floating on the water below the broom. Lighter than the broom. Approximately the size of a man's clenched fist. Possibly a piece of cloth wrapped around a smaller thing. I will bring up the broom first, the porcelain second, and the small dark object third."
"Yes."
He turned. He sat at the edge of the well-cap, swung his legs over, and lowered himself onto the rope with the slow careful Buddhist clauses of a man who had, in some former life of his own, learned how to climb down ropes without comment. He went out of sight.
Wanjun stood at the well-rim. An Naxia was at the kitchen door, beside Aspand. Mowei was at the worktop, baking, with the deliberate hands of a girl who had been doing the same motion for so many years that the motion had become the small private thing she did instead of weeping. The morning continued.
Brother Hui's voice came up out of the well — clear, dry, conversational.
"Sister Cui."
"Brother Hui."
"The broom handle has a small piece of fabric caught in the bristles. The fabric is undyed cotton. It is a piece of a man's inner wristband — the narrow strip of cotton a Han male wears under the cuff of his sleeve to absorb the sweat of the wrist. The wristband has, on it, a small woven mark — a thin red thread, three crosswise stitches at one end. The mark is the laundry-mark of an Eastern Market laundry. I will, by tomorrow, tell you which Eastern Market laundry, if you wish."
"I wish."
"I will. I will bring up the broom now."
The broom came up. It was a Sogdian household broom of the kind kept in front courts: a bundle of stiff dried millet-straw bound around a wooden handle, the straw not yet rotted, the binding wet and slimed. Caught in the binding, just below the bristles, was a torn narrow strip of damp cotton, perhaps two finger-widths wide, with the small three-cross red mark Brother Hui had described. Wanjun unhooked it from the binding herself, in her own grey sleeve, and dried it on the corner of her sleeve, and rolled it small, and put it in the brass bowl in her sleeve.
"Brother Hui."
"Sister Cui."
"The porcelain."
"Coming."
The porcelain came up next, in a small Buddhist begging-bowl which Brother Hui had taken from his bag for the purpose and which he had filled, at the bottom of the well, with a single mostly-intact cup-shard of cream-white glazed porcelain. He climbed up one-handed, gave the bowl to Aspand, and went down again for the third object.
Wanjun took the bowl. She held it to the light. The shard was the curved side of a cup, broken on a clean break — the kind of break a porcelain cup made when knocked from a table to a brick floor by a moving forearm rather than by a falling impact. The break was fresh; the inner edge had not yet weathered. On the outer convex face of the shard, near the upper rim, was the small underglaze mark of a Tang official kiln — a stylised three-pronged gear inside a small square.
The same mark — exactly the same mark — as the reverse of the silver ingot in the cedar cabinet in the elder An's counting-room.
She filed it. She filed it carefully. She did not, this morning, allow herself the small flat private feeling she had filed at the half of the eighth hour of last night, when she had registered the same mark on the back of the silver. She was very careful, now, with the small filed room. The room had become — she registered, in the small precise idiom of her own self-management — a room whose load-bearing walls she needed to keep clean for the rest of the day.
She turned the shard. On the inside concave face of the shard, near the rim, was a faint dark line of something — not glaze; the residue of something liquid. A wine residue. Bitter. Possibly. She did not, at the well-side, sniff the shard. She would, in Brother Hui's hands, this afternoon.
Brother Hui came up again. He had, in his right hand, the small dark object.
It was a piece of cloth wrapped around a smaller thing. The cloth was an undyed cotton corner of a man's sleeve-lining; the smaller thing inside it, when he unwrapped it on the well-cap and the air of the kitchen yard hit it, was a single small object the size of a fingertip — a small uncut piece of green stone, pale, milky, slightly oily under the morning light.
A pre-cutting Khotanese jade.
The same grade — possibly the same parent stone — as the single grain she had been told, by the outline of her case in the small filed room of her own anticipations, would, in the seventh day or so of her investigation, be in the rim of a flour-jar in the storeroom.
She had been anticipating one grain. There was, instead, a fragment of the size of a fingertip.
She lifted it. She turned it in the light. She did not, in front of Brother Hui or An Naxia or Aspand, say what she was thinking, which was that the Han silk-merchant of the Eastern Market had been carrying out of this compound the night before last, on his person, in his sleeve-lining, a single fragment of Khotanese jade of pre-cutting grade, in roughly the quantity that would have constituted a single sample of the fourth consignment he had been refused at the table. He had not gone out empty-handed. He had taken his sample. He had been pretending — that part she filed even as she registered it — to himself that the consignment was still a consignment that could be reactivated at a future date. He had thought, even at the moment of leaving the dying household behind him, that there would be a future date. He had been overconfident.
She filed his overconfidence.
She filed the shard.
She filed the jade.
She filed the laundry-mark.
She filed the broom in its slow careful pattern of removal-as-evidence-destruction.
She filed, in the small filed room, the small precise three-pronged gear inside a small square.
She closed the door of the small filed room. She put three stones in front of it.
"Brother Hui."
"Sister Cui."
"To the storeroom."
*
The storeroom of the An compound was at the western end of the kitchen, behind a low door that had been left unbolted because Aspand had unbolted it before they came. It was a small dark room, perhaps three paces by two, with shelves on three walls and a stone floor swept clean. The shelves held the bulk household goods: a sack of millet, a sack of rice flour, two sacks of wheat flour, a row of small ceramic jars for the household's apothecary stores. The apothecary jars were the relevant ones. She did not yet go to them.
She went, first, to the flour-jar.
The flour-jar was a large stoneware vessel with a wooden cover, set at the corner of the eastern shelf, on the floor. She knelt beside it. She lifted the cover. The wheat flour inside was perhaps three-quarters full. The surface was undisturbed except — at the rim of the jar, on the inside, where the flour met the stoneware — by the small narrow drag of a finger, in a curved arc of perhaps a thumb's length, where a man's index finger had been drawn through the surface flour at the rim, in the small idle motion of a man scooping a small object out of the rim.
Caught in the flour at the corner of the arc, half-buried, was a single small whitish particle. She lifted it on the tip of her own little finger. She held it to the lamp Brother Hui had lit for her at the storeroom door.
It was not flour. It was a single uncut pale-green grain of Khotanese stone, the size of a millet seed, milky, slightly oily. The same parent stone, almost certainly, as the larger fragment in the cotton from the well.
She filed it.
So — Zhang Cong had carried in, somewhere in the seam of his coat or the lining of his sleeve, a small pinch of uncut jade samples, which he had perhaps shown the elder An at the noon hour of the day before yesterday, in the cellar; one grain had fallen into the flour-jar at that hour; the fragment in the sleeve-lining had been carried out at the eleventh hour of the same night, by the silk-merchant himself, behind the screen.
She had two grains.
She had the broom. She had the cushion in the basket. She had the porcelain shard. She had the silver ingot in the counting-room. She had the slip her husband had left at the elder An's cabinet six months ago. She had Madam Khorshid's identification of the broker's principal. She had Mowei's testimony of Pang the Han clerk with a wen at the throat and a rolling left foot. She had Datis's testimony of Sirin and the libation. She had Datis's testimony of the cabinet. She had the sabao's testimony of three taels. She had An Naxia's commitment to count the Tibetan agent ten days hence.
And she had — she registered now, in the small careful patience she had taught herself in eighteen months — the seven characters her husband had written in the middle of his slip, and the address of the broker, and the address of the principal, and the slow careful patience of a man who had laid the trail for her six months before he had died.
She had, this morning, almost enough.
She did not yet have the inner room of Sirin. She did not yet have the second small object the broker had carried out — for it was now clear, by Brother Hui's morning soliloquy and by the jade in the sleeve-lining, that the broker had carried three things, not one: the cushion, the broom, and the small wrapped object. The cushion she would inspect this afternoon. The broom she had. The small wrapped object was the jade. Three objects. He had carried the cushion because — she thought, and now she allowed the thought — the cushion was the only piece of furniture in the household that bore his weight-print, and a Sogdian cushion of the seat-of-honour position, woven in the Bukharan stitch, took a man's weight-print on its underside in the small specific way a saddle took the print of a horse's withers. He had removed the cushion because he had been told to. He had been told by — she registered — a man who knew that a careful investigator, by the second day, would walk the table and count the places, and would find the seventh place's cushion if the cushion were left, and would find the cushion's weight-print would match no man at the table, and would file the cushion as the small narrow specific evidence of the seventh man's identity.
He had been told by a man whose private retinue had been bodyguards trained against careful investigators.
He had been told, she thought, by Yang Guozhong.
She filed the inference.
She closed the small filed room. She put four stones in front of it.
"Brother Hui."
"Sister Cui."
"The apothecary jars."
He went, in his slow careful Buddhist clauses, along the row of small ceramic jars on the eastern shelf. He read each label in Sogdian — Aspand stood at his shoulder and translated, in soft Tang, when the label was a hand he did not know. He read fourteen jars. At the eleventh he stopped.
"Sister Cui."
"Brother Hui."
"The eleventh jar is labelled in Sogdian southern climbing vine, three pinches per ten cups wine. The Sogdian word is gelsemium. The jar is full to the brim. The jar's seal is broken. The break in the seal is fresh — the wax of the seal is still bright. The jar has been opened, sister, within the last forty-eight hours."
"And the broken seal."
"Inside the jar, at the very surface, are perhaps three pinches' worth of flat dry leaf-curl, lying in a small pile in the middle of the jar's surface. The pinches are arranged as a small pile because the pinches were not taken out. The pinches were poured back in."
"Poured back in."
"Poured back in. Sister, a person opened this jar the night before last, took three pinches out, prepared the libation in the porcelain cups, then — perhaps in fear, perhaps in second thought, perhaps in a small narrow shudder of the conscience of a young woman of twenty-three — emptied back into this jar a little more than the original three pinches. The dose at the table was therefore less than the dose the user intended. The dose at the table was, on my private estimate, sub-fatal in itself. The wine was not the killing dose. The wine was the loosener."
"And the killing dose."
"Came from somewhere else. From a second cup, sister. Or from a herb that was in the food. Or from a vapour in the brazier of the gallery — though the brazier of the gallery was, by your morning observation, cold. I would say the killing dose was the third Han-style cup. The third Han-style cup, sister, did not match. The third Han-style cup was a substitution. It was a cup the silk-merchant brought into the room in his sleeve, set down at the table when the lady of the house was not looking, and into which he had previously dosed something stronger than gelsemium — perhaps aconite, perhaps a Sogdian wormwood compound — and which he caused the patriarch, by some courtesy of his own arrangement, to drink. The patriarch drank from the third Han-style cup. The patriarch — and only the patriarch — drank from the third Han-style cup. The patriarch died first. The patriarch died at the table. The household, who had drunk the wine of Sirin's libation, slept the slow sleep of gelsemium and were, in their slow sleep, finished off by the silk-merchant's small private hand, which is why their faces show no agony and why your morning notes will record that the patriarch's left thumbnail was bruised."
"His thumbnail."
"Sister. He was the only one who knew. He saw the cup. He recognised the third Han-style cup as a cup that did not belong to his household. He, in the slow seconds of his understanding, reached for the cup and struck the rim of his own cup against it in the small ringing way an old Sogdian patriarch tests the porcelain of his own table — and in that small ringing, sister, he jammed his thumbnail against the cup. He knew, in his last conscious minute, that his guest had brought a poisoned cup into his hall."
She filed the patriarch's last conscious minute.
"Brother Hui."
"Sister Cui."
"You will tell me, at the apothecary, when the patriarch was killed."
"At the table, sister. Within the half hour of the silk-merchant's arrival at the seventh hour of the night before last. By the third Han-style cup. The household died over the subsequent two hours, slowly, of the gelsemium, finished off — quietly, one by one — by the silk-merchant's small private hand, after the patriarch lay dead. The silk-merchant left the compound, with his broom and his cushion and his sample of jade, at the eleventh hour of the night before last. He had spent four hours in the hall of a Sogdian household watching seven people he had killed die. Sister Cui."
She did not, on this small piece of testimony, allow herself any expression.
"Brother Hui."
"Sister."
"You will tell me the small careful patience he had, in the front court behind the screen, for the last fifteen minutes of his four hours."
"Sister, the small careful patience of a man who, in his small narrow life of the seven doors, had been told by his patron, at a private dinner in his own inner study six months ago, that the perfecting of his trade required exactly this. He stood behind the screen. He had bitten — by the lower segment of his right little finger which he is missing, but by the wound on the wrist of his right hand which today is fresh — he had bitten through his own old finger-scar to provoke a small flow of his own blood at the wrist, so that, on his way out of the compound, he would leave on the third panel of the painted Bukharan screen a single drop of blood. The drop, sister, was a calling-card. The drop is the small narrow vanity of a man whose patron had asked him for a confirmation. The drop is the signed receipt of the broker to the principal that the consignment was — by the broker's own preferred metaphor — collected. He bled at the screen because his patron, who would not enter this compound, would later be told, in his own inner study, that the broker had collected. The blood was the broker's signature."
She filed the broker's signature.
She filed the broker's vanity.
She filed the patron's request.
She closed the small filed room. She put five stones in front of it.
"Brother Hui."
"Sister Cui."
"You will not, between this hour and the eighth day of the seventh month, repeat anything you have said in this storeroom."
"Sister."
"You will not even, if asked, say that I asked you."
"Sister, I have, in fifteen years of unfrocking, learned to say nothing to most questions. The question of who paid me to read the Pahlavi correspondence of a Persian wine-broker is the only question of the last six months I have answered. I will not, today, begin a habit."
"Brother Hui."
"Sister."
"Thank you."
He bowed in the small careful half-bow of a Chan monk who had not been a Chan monk for four years. He had, she thought, at this moment, in this storeroom, in his patched cotton with his rope at his shoulder and his lamp-wire in his sleeve and his old leather jiabei bag at his feet, the small private dignity of a man whose lungs had been trained at the age of eight and who, in his small narrow life, was still occasionally permitted, by his own small careful Buddhist discipline, to be the most intelligent man in the room.
*
She walked through the kitchen to the kitchen yard. Mowei had completed her bread. The bread was on the worktop in seven rounds, in the Sogdian household-mourning custom that required seven rounds for the second day of a household of seven dead. Mowei had baked a seventh round. Mowei had not, in the seven rounds, baked one for the kitchen girl herself. She filed the kitchen girl's seven rounds.
She walked through the kitchen yard, past the smiling well — which had stopped smiling, now that the broom and the porcelain shard and the small wrapped jade had been taken out of it; the well had become, this morning, a well — across the small low side door, and out into the alley behind the An compound.
An Naxia was at the kitchen door, with Aspand. He had been at the kitchen door for the whole of the well-work; he had not, throughout the well-work, intervened. He had watched. He had — she registered — watched Brother Hui go down into a Sogdian household well with a Buddhist begging-bowl and a brass lamp and come up with three pieces of his own family's evidence, and had not, in the watching, allowed himself any of the half-dozen small Han or Sogdian etiquette gestures of intervention a man of his rank in his uncle's compound would have been entitled to make. He had stood. He had filed. He had been — she allowed herself, in the small flat private filed room she had been keeping for him for thirty-six hours — almost not a witness. He had been a colleague.
She paused at the kitchen door.
"An gongzi."
"Lady."
"This afternoon. The apartments behind the fire-temple. The third hour. With Madam Khorshid of the House of the Cool Vine, who will sit with the lady Sirin in the second room. I would prefer that you not be in the courtyard during the sitting."
"Yes, lady."
"I will, at the half of the fourth hour, walk back to your uncle's compound for the second sweep with Brother Hui. You will, at the half of the fourth hour, sit with your aunt Datis. You will, in your sitting, tell your aunt the things she has, this morning, earned the right to be told. You will tell her about the third Han-style cup, the patriarch's thumbnail, the broom, the porcelain shard, the jade in the sleeve-lining, and the broker's signature on the third panel of the screen. You will not tell her my husband's slip. You will not tell her the principal."
"Lady — "
"Yes."
"Yes."
"After the sitting with your aunt — at the seventh hour, in your caravanserai office — you and I will sit, alone, with the door bolted, and you will tell me, an gongzi, four things in the order in which I will ask them. The first is the name of the fanyang paymaster from whom the silver ingot in your uncle's cabinet was extracted. The second is the name of the Tibetan agent expected at the spring caravan, and the route he will travel. The third is whether your sister An Bibi has, in the last six months, written to your aunt Datis. The fourth is whether the small wax-print on the seal of the letter the Han silk-merchant sent yesterday morning to Censor Lu Zhongming has, on its inner edge, the small fanyang signet that would, by my private estimate, be the signature of a frontier-army agent in Chang'an."
He looked at her.
"You have known," he said, very quietly, "since the count of one hundred yesterday morning."
"I have known since my husband wrote eleven characters six months before he died, and I have been told the contents of the eleven characters less than eighteen hours ago. The intervening eighteen hours I have used to file. I am not, an gongzi, ahead of you. I am alongside you. I am asking — in the order in which I will ask them, an gongzi, this evening, in your caravanserai office, with the door bolted — for the four pieces of the case I cannot obtain except through you. I am asking, in the asking, your permission to obtain them."
He did not answer immediately. He stood, in the kitchen door, in his mourning white that was, this morning, no longer fresh, his hair tied back, the small dried nick at the angle of his jaw still pale. He was — she registered — looking at her with the careful nothing that had been on his face yesterday morning at the front-court gate. He was looking at her, this morning, with the careful nothing of a man who had decided, last night, in his caravanserai office, alone, with a brand he had not relit, that the Han widow who had stood in the doorway of his uncle's hall and counted seven embroideries against seven beats of breath was a woman he was about to commit himself to, in a manner he had not yet decided.
He bowed.
"Lady Cui."
"An gongzi."
"At the seventh hour, in my office, with the door bolted, I will tell you the four things. The first I know. The second I know in part. The third I know. The fourth I will know — and I will have on my desk for you to see — by the third hour of this afternoon."
"Thank you."
"Lady."
"Yes."
"Lady, I am — "
He did not finish the sentence. He did not, she registered, need to finish the sentence. She had filed the sentence at I am, and would, in the small filed room she kept now for sentences in his voice that had not yet been finished, allow it to sit unfinished against the inner wall for the rest of the day. She did not, this morning, in the kitchen door of his uncle's compound, allow herself to think about what the next two characters of the sentence might be. She would think about them, perhaps, on a winter evening some years later, when the case had been closed for so long that thinking about the unfinished sentence would not, by then, be a thing that endangered him.
She inclined her head. She turned. She walked out into the alley.
*
She rode home through the wards in the slow patient walk of a woman who had completed, in the first half of a single day, the work of perhaps a fortnight. She did not, this midday, allow herself the small private satisfaction of the work; she filed the work. She would, in the small slow careful Sogdian household-mourning custom of her own private case-keeping, allow herself the small private satisfaction of the work, perhaps, on the day Zhang Cong was walked, alive or dead, into the Censorate.
At the corner of Vermilion-Bird Avenue and the broad east-west cross-street that led back to Yongchong, a Pei runner met her — the older one, the grizzled one from yesterday's afternoon — standing at the corner with his hands folded inside his sleeves, in the careful patience of a man who had been waiting in the same spot for an hour.
He bowed.
"Mistress."
"You have not come to the gate."
"My lord wishes me not to be seen at your gate this morning. My lord has been observing aloud, mistress."
"At this hour."
"At this hour."
"Then walk with me to the gate of Anyi. Speak the soliloquy on the walk."
He walked beside the mare. He spoke at the small even level of a man who had memorised three drafts of the same soliloquy and had decided to deliver the third.
"My lord observes," he said, "that Censor Lu Zhongming this morning, at the second hour, received in his office a sealed slip from the Office of the Western Market, by hand of a junior recorder. My lord observes that Censor Lu, on reading the slip, immediately sent a runner of his own to the Censorate library to fetch the dossiers of one Cui Yanzhi, late junior censor, on the matter of his Hexi circuit reports of the spring of 749. My lord observes that the dossier was checked out of the library, on Censor Lu's authority, at the third hour of this morning. My lord observes that Censor Lu, by my lord's quietest of inquiries, intends to lay before the Censorate at the second-day audience tomorrow the matter of a Manichaean lay cell in the southern wards, in connection with the deaths in Liquan Ward of the night before last. My lord observes that the Manichaean lay cell, by my lord's prior knowledge, is one over which the Censorate has been hesitating for three months, and that the cell elder, by my lord's prior knowledge, has been in the Censorate's custody since the third hour of yesterday afternoon, on a matter unrelated to Liquan Ward. My lord observes that the cell elder will be questioned, in the Censorate basement, this evening, by Censor Lu personally. My lord observes that, by morning, the cell elder may have, in the formal record of the Censorate, confessed."
She listened. She did not, in the avenue, allow her face to do anything.
"My lord observes that a junior censor on his own circuit reports filed in 749 — those, that is, on the Hexi circuit — may be of more use to a junior censor's widow than to a senior censor preparing the audience of the second day. My lord observes that the library, mistress, will not, by my lord's quiet arrangement, have the dossier on its return shelf when Censor Lu's runner returns to fetch it tomorrow afternoon. My lord observes that the dossier will, in the meantime, be in a small wooden box on the back step of the kitchen of a tea-house at the corner of the third turning south of the Censorate, in the third hour of this afternoon, beneath three cabbages, where the late junior censor's widow, were she to be in the area in the third hour of this afternoon — wearing, mistress, a market-woman's coat and not Daoist grey — would be able to retrieve it without difficulty."
She filed the third hour of the afternoon. She filed the tea-house, the third turning south, the kitchen door, the three cabbages, the dossier. She filed Pei's small inevitable courtesy of the market-woman's coat.
"My lord observes."
"Yes."
"And one further thing."
"Yes."
"My lord observes that the An Lushan party reached the Tongguan pass at noon today, by post-rider report received at the Censorate at the third hour of this morning. My lord observes that the An Lushan party will reach Chang'an by the seventh hour of the day after tomorrow. My lord observes that General An has, in his letter to the Office of Imperial Sacrifices, requested an audience with the chancellor at the noon hour of the third day."
She filed the seventh hour of the day after tomorrow. She filed audience with the chancellor. She filed General An Lushan, at the noon hour of the third day, in the same city as a young Sogdian woman named An Bibi who had been married, two years ago, into his household.
She filed it, and she filed it carefully, and she put six stones in front of the small filed room.
"My lord wishes me to know," she said.
"Yes, mistress."
"My lord wishes me to know because my lord has decided, this morning, that the case I am working is the case of which the An Lushan visit is — in some part my lord does not yet specify — a relevant background."
"Mistress."
"My lord."
"My lord observes that the case of the Liquan deaths is, at this hour, the case of an unhappy Manichaean lay-cell and a frightened sabao, and that this is the case that will, at the second-day audience tomorrow, be heard. My lord further observes — and this, mistress, is the last of the soliloquy — that a woman of my lord's acquaintance who has, in two days, gathered as much of the under-story of this case as she has, by my lord's private estimate, gathered, will not be at the second-day audience tomorrow, and will not be in the avenue tomorrow afternoon either; she will be, at her own discretion, in her own courtyard in Yongchong, with the bar of her gate up, and she will, if she will permit my lord this last observation, allow my lord to send to her, in the late afternoon of tomorrow, a small private dossier of seven names, on which my lord himself does not entirely agree, but on which my lord, for the moment, defers."
Pei was — he had been, all his life — a man of careful caution. He had, this morning, in the medium of a junior runner's recitation, told her in two and a half sentences that he had been keeping his own private dossier of seven names. He had, by the deferral, told her that the seven names overlapped, in some portion he had not specified, with the eleven characters her husband had written, six months before he died, on a slip in a cedar cabinet. He had, by the small private courtesy of the deferral, signalled that the dossier was for her and not for the Censorate.
He had — she allowed herself, in the small private filed room she now kept for Pei — invested.
She inclined her head.
"My lord."
"Mistress."
"My lord has been observing aloud."
"At this hour, mistress."
"At this hour."
The runner bowed. He stepped aside at the corner of Anyi Ward. He waited for her to ride on. She rode on. She did not, this morning, look back at him.
She rode toward Yongchong in the slow patient walk of a woman who had — in the first two days of her first major case in eighteen months — assembled, by the small slow patient practice of her father's discipline, more of the under-story of a Tang murder than any junior censor in the bureaucracy had yet assembled of any case in this calendar year.
She rode home.
*
In the writing-room she did not, at the half of the noon hour, light the lamp. The morning sun came through the south window in the slow patient way the spring sun came through south windows in Yongchong Ward, and the lacquered letter-box sat on the writing-desk in the small clean square of the sunlight.
She sat down at her desk.
She put her hand flat on the lid.
She did not, this midday, lift it.
The eleven characters were in her head. The slip her husband had left in the cabinet was burned. The letter beneath the slip was, by Datis's permission, in the small velvet pouch of the cabinet still — she would retrieve it this evening, after the seventh hour, after the sitting with Sirin and the long meeting with An Naxia in the caravanserai office. The dossier on the back step of the tea-house under three cabbages would be in her sleeve by the third hour. The cushion in the basket would, by Mowei's hand, be in the apartments behind the fire-temple by the noon drum. The shard from the well, the small wrapped jade, the broom-fabric with the laundry mark — all of these would, by Brother Hui's hand, be locked in the cedar box at the bottom of his old leather jiabei satchel, in the unused brick kiln at the edge of Anhua Ward, by the time of the dusk drum.
She had — for the very first time since the dusk drum that the runner had come over her back wall and told her, in Pei's syntax, that the An household had gone quiet — the small flat private feeling of having begun.
She filed the feeling.
She closed the small filed room.
She put a single stone in front of it. Not a stack of stones. A single stone. The feeling was a small private feeling and would, today, be kept for one stone only.
She lifted her hand from the lid of the box.
She did not, this midday, open it.
She would open it on the evening of the day Zhang Cong walked, alive or dead, into the Censorate.
She had — she registered, in the small filed corridor of her own discipline — finally settled on the order. The order had been her husband's. He had set her the slip, the letter, the silver, the dossier, the trail. He had not, in his slip, set her the box. The box was hers. The box, in the order he had laid for her, was the room she would open on the day she walked his work to its proper end.
She did not — for the very small flat second she allowed herself, looking at the small red plum-blossom inset of the lid — allow herself to think of him.
She filed him.
She closed the small filed room.
She put one stone in front of it.
Then she rose. She put on the small dun-coloured market-woman's coat she kept folded at the bottom of the second chest in her sleeping-room, the coat she had not worn since the year of her marriage, when she had once worn it, with her late husband, to a small back-lane wine-shop in Pingkang on the fifteenth of the eighth month for a holiday they had then never repeated. She did not, this midday, allow herself the memory of the holiday. She filed the holiday. She put the coat on over her grey. She tied a small market-woman's headcloth at her hair. She went, by the back lane, on foot, to the tea-house at the corner of the third turning south of the Censorate.
The three cabbages were on the back step of the kitchen door. They were good cabbages — the late spring cabbages of the southern suburbs, the small tight green-hearted ones the market-women preferred. Beneath the three cabbages was a small wooden box about the size of a poultry-basket. She lifted the cabbages aside, set them in the small market-woman's basket she had carried for the purpose, lifted the wooden box into the basket beneath the cabbages, replaced the cabbages on top, and walked away with the basket in the slow patient walk of a market-woman who had bought cabbages from a tea-house and had no further business in the third turning south of the Censorate.
At her own gate, in Yongchong, she handed the basket to Nanny Zhou.
"Mistress."
"Nanny."
"Cabbages."
"Cabbages, nanny. For supper. Beneath the cabbages there is a wooden box. The wooden box is to be brought to my writing-room. The cabbages are to be cooked."
"Yes, mistress."
"Nanny."
"Mistress."
"You did not bake this morning."
Nanny Zhou looked at the wrist of her own left hand, which still bore the small thin trail of millet flour from the eighth hour of last evening, and looked at Wanjun. She did not, this morning, comment.
"No, mistress."
"Good."
She did not, in the courtyard, smile. She filed the small private fact that, at the half of the eighth hour of last evening, Nanny Zhou had been baking against grief, and at the half of the noon hour of this day, Nanny Zhou had finished. She filed it. She did not, today, look at Nanny Zhou's face.
She crossed to the writing-room. She did not, on this crossing, look at the lacquered box.
She had — she registered, in the small filed corridor — opened, in two days, twelve doors. There were perhaps nine more to open before the day Zhang Cong walked, alive or dead, into the Censorate.
She would open them.
She sat down at her desk. She did not light a lamp. The noon sun came through the south window. She drew the wooden dossier-box from the basket to her desk. She set it square on the writing-desk. She lifted the lid.
The dossier inside was thicker than she had expected.
She began, in the small careful patience of her father's discipline, to read.