Chapter Six
The Apartments Behind the Fire-Temple
The dossier was thicker than she had expected, and it was, when she opened it, less of a dossier than a stack.
Three slim sub-folders, in the older style of the Hexi circuit: a coarse-grass paper outer wrapper around each, the wrapper folded once at the corner in the small angled crease that meant do not return to library, return to issuing officer. The outer wrappers had been recently re-tied; the cord still smelled of the rope-vendor's stall at the corner of Buzheng. The inside papers were rougher than the wrappers, and older, and had been read before — read often. The brown thumb-stain near the top of the second wrapper was, she thought, her husband's own. She had seen the print, twice, on the corner of the letter-box.
She did not, this midday, allow herself to look at the thumb-print.
She read the first wrapper.
It was an inventory of customs-house declarations filed at the Hexi station of Liangzhou between the autumn of 748 and the spring of 749 — a list of Sogdian and Khotanese consignments by household, by weight, by commodity, with the inspector's seal on each line. The names she expected to see were there. Two were not. A third household had filed inventories whose declared weights did not match the inspector's noted weights — the kind of arithmetic discrepancy a junior censor of the Cui Yanzhi school would have flagged in the margin with a small ink-mark like a comma turned upside down.
There were three such marks on the page.
The second wrapper held a copy, in her husband's hand, of a letter he had sent the sabao of Liangzhou in the third month of 749 requesting clarification on a particular shipment of "untooled western mineral." The shipment had moved from Khotan to Liangzhou to Chang'an in the third month and had then, by the sabao's reply on the next page, "not arrived in Chang'an at any registered weighhouse." The shipment was four hundred jin. The sabao's reply was three sentences long. The last sentence said: Junior censor will inquire elsewhere.
The third wrapper was empty.
Not empty as in the papers had been removed. Empty as in the cord and the wrapper had been re-tied around a wrapper-shaped absence, which a careful reader would notice and a careless reader would not. The wrapper still bore the dossier title in her husband's own hand: Inquiries — fourth quarter 749, ongoing. The cord on this one was new. The cord on this one had been tied yesterday afternoon.
She closed the dossier. She did not, for some seconds, lift her hands from the cover.
She had — she registered, in the careful corridor of her own self-keeping — perhaps half of what her husband had assembled in the last months of his life. Pei had given her two wrappers and the wrapper-shape of a third. The third had been lifted, by Pei or by someone above Pei, before the box reached the back step of the tea-house. She did not yet know which.
She wrote, on a fresh wax tablet, three lines.
Half a dossier is a courtesy and a warning.
The cord on the third was tied yesterday.
Yanzhi marked the inverted commas.
She rubbed them out.
\ \ \*
The apartments behind the Liquan fire-temple were a single low row of three rooms that opened onto a courtyard the size of two cart-beds. The courtyard had a small pomegranate tree in the corner and a small clay water-jar by the gate. The water-jar was, this afternoon, full to the brim, with a clean ladle hung on the rim. Someone had filled it in the last hour.
Madam Khorshid was at the gate. She had come on foot, as Wanjun had asked, in the dun-coloured headcloth of a Persian widow on a private errand. She wore the small black silk-square at her left cuff which, in the wineshop trade, indicated mourning of a non-relative. Wanjun had not asked her to wear it. She had worn it anyway.
"Lady Cui."
"Madam Khorshid."
"The second room."
"Yes."
Madam Khorshid did not move from the gate. She looked, briefly, at the water-jar, and at the pomegranate, and at the door of the second room.
"The girl is nineteen," she said. "She has been awake since the dusk drum yesterday. She has not eaten. She has been told by the sabao's aunt, this morning, that the naasalar will not perform the dawn rite for her family until the matter of the libation has been settled by the lady Cui. The girl has therefore been told, in the small Sogdian household-mourning idiom of pressure, that her family's seventh-dawn cremation depends on what she says in the next hour."
"That was not my instruction."
"It was not. The sabao's aunt is, in her own house, an instrument of pressure I do not yet command, and you do not yet command. Lady Datis has, this morning, set the pressure on the girl herself."
"Why."
Madam Khorshid did not answer immediately. She took, from the inside of her sleeve, a small folded square of paper, and laid it on the rim of the water-jar.
"This was on the third panel of the screen, this morning, after we wiped the blood at the half of the noon hour. The new wipe is clean. The paper was tucked behind the screen, in the slot between the panel and the frame, where one might tuck a small private prayer-slip. It is addressed in Sogdian to Lady Datis of the seven dead. It is signed in Sogdian the broker."
Wanjun did not, on this small piece of evidence, allow herself to lift the paper.
"And the content."
"Lady. Allow the girl her speech. The household will be the better for her speech. The market knows the seventh of seven was always the lady of the inner. Do not, lady, allow the foreign nun to follow the seventh into any further inner room."
The wind moved through the pomegranate. A small green pomegranate, hard as a stone, dropped onto the flagstone of the courtyard and rolled three handsbreadths and stopped.
"Madam Khorshid."
"Lady Cui."
"The note is a kindness from the broker to the lady of the house."
"It is."
"It is also a threat."
"It is."
"To whom."
"To you, lady. The seventh inner room is the room I do not yet know the location of. The broker is telling Lady Datis to permit the girl her testimony and to not permit you a further room. The broker is telling you that the further room exists and that it is the room you should be looking for."
"Or that you should not be."
Madam Khorshid inclined her head a finger's width.
"I have," she said, "in Persia we say, the small habit of reading the lining of the coat before the coat. The lining of this coat is that the broker is willing to set down a written instruction. The broker, lady, is overconfident. The broker is also — I think — bored. The broker is, in his small narrow life of the seven doors, beginning to write notes."
She lifted the paper into Wanjun's hand.
Wanjun took it. She did not, this afternoon, allow herself to read it again.
"The girl," she said.
"In the second room."
\ \ \*
Sirin was sitting on a low straw mat against the south wall, with her knees drawn up under the unbleached mourning cotton, her hands folded inside her sleeves, her hair loose. She had been twenty-three the day before yesterday. She looked, this afternoon, perhaps thirty. The skin under her eyes was the slate-grey of a person who had not slept in two nights and had been crying with the deliberate small economy of a woman who had been taught not to cry where she could be heard.
Madam Khorshid sat against the east wall. Wanjun sat against the west. Sirin sat between them, against the south, with the door behind her.
There was a small clay pot of millet gruel on the floor between Madam Khorshid and Sirin. There was a small wooden cup of water beside it. Wanjun did not, on entering, look at the gruel or the cup. She placed her hands flat in her lap. She waited.
After some minutes, Sirin lifted the cup and drank. She set the cup down. She did not lift the spoon.
"Lady Cui."
"Sirin."
"They say you have already known."
"I have known the broom and the cushion and the porcelain and the jade and the libation. I have known the third Han-style cup and the patriarch's thumbnail. I have not known the lady of the inner. I have come to be told, by the lady of the inner, what was the lady's hand and what was not."
Sirin breathed in once. She held the breath at the inside of her chest for the count of perhaps four heartbeats and let it out.
"My hand was the cup of wine."
"Yes."
"My hand was not the third Han-style cup."
"No. Brother Hui has told me. The third Han-style cup was the silk-merchant's."
"My hand was the cup of wine that they had — that he had — said would put them all to sleep."
"He."
"The broker. The silk-merchant. The Han with the soft voice. He came to my mother's house, in Loulan, in the autumn of last year. He gave my mother forty pieces of silver. He said the family I was being married into in Chang'an was a debt-marriage to settle a matter between my brother and the lord of Loulan. My mother said yes. I said yes. I came to Chang'an. I was married in the second month."
The wind moved through the pomegranate again. Madam Khorshid did not, against the east wall, move.
"You did not know what the silver was."
"I did not. My mother did not. The lord of Loulan, in our part, is a small honest man who pays for everything by note in his own hand. The silver, lady, came in a small leather pouch I did not see opened. I knew only that my brother's matter was settled, and that I would marry."
"And in Chang'an."
"In Chang'an, lady, I was the lady of the seventh place at the patriarch's table. I was the bride of the youngest brother. I was the cook of the small foreign dishes the patriarch's wife had stopped cooking. I was — for two months — well treated. The patriarch's wife taught me the table-grammar. The youngest brother was kind. The middle brother's wife asked me, in the third month, whether I would write to a man named the silk-merchant a small slip in Sogdian saying I was content."
She paused.
"I wrote it."
"And the second slip."
"The second slip was in the fourth month, lady, saying the family was content. The third slip in the fifth month. By the sixth month I was writing one slip a month and the silk-merchant — whom I had still not met, lady, only by report — was sending me, by way of the middle brother's wife, a small private packet of dried apricots in a folded paper. The folded paper was always the same paper. The packet was always the same weight. I ate the apricots. I had no language for what I was doing. I thought I was writing to a guarantor."
"And the night before last."
"The night before last the middle brother's wife came to my room in the eighth hour and gave me the apothecary jar of the southern climbing vine. She said the silk-merchant had told her the household needed three pinches of the leaf in the wine, at the libation, before the meal, for the household's sleep. She said the household had been sleeping badly and that the silk-merchant, who was a guest tonight, had brought the remedy as a courtesy of his own arrangement. She said I was to do this because the lady of the seventh place did the libation in this household. She said the lady of the seventh place did this as the small specific work of the seventh place at the table."
She paused.
"I went to the apothecary. I opened the jar. I took out three pinches. I carried them in a small porcelain dish back to the kitchen. I crushed them in the small stone bowl. I poured the wine over them. I waited for them to steep."
"And then."
"And then, lady, in the small quiet seven minutes the wine was steeping, I — I did a thing I have, since, been telling myself two stories about. I am not yet — I am not, lady, sure which is true."
She looked at her own hands.
"What I did was: I poured a part of the steeped wine into a second dish, and I poured the leaf back into the jar. I did this because I had — because in the seven minutes of the steeping I had thought, lady, that the southern climbing vine, in our part of Loulan, is a leaf you do not give to a sleeping household; it is a leaf you give to a horse that does not stand. I had thought my mother said that. I had thought it in a small narrow second of the seven minutes. I had then thought: no. I had then thought: the silk-merchant is a guest of the patriarch, and the patriarch has not turned away a guest in fifty years, and the silk-merchant is the guarantor of my marriage. I had then poured the steeped wine into the dish — most of the wine, lady, but not all of the wine — and put the cup of the libation on the table at the start of the meal."
She paused.
"The story I tell myself, lady, when I am awake, is that I gave the household a half-dose because I wanted them to be only sleepy, not asleep, not gone. The story I tell myself when I am not awake is that I did not know what I was doing in the seven minutes. The first story is the story of a woman who suspected. The second is the story of a woman who did not. I do not, lady, know which is true. I have been awake since the dusk drum yesterday, asking myself."
She lifted her face.
The skin under her eyes was as slate-grey as it had been ten minutes earlier. Her mouth was very small.
"I gave them a half-dose, lady. I poured most of the leaf back. I am the lady of the seventh place. I did not, lady, know what I was doing. I knew, lady, what I was doing."
She stopped.
Wanjun did not, for some seconds, speak.
She had come to this room — she registered, in the small careful corridor of her own discipline — prepared to find a woman who had been a clean instrument. The morning's reconstruction had argued that the half-dose had been the small reluctant gesture of a frightened girl. The morning's reconstruction had been a story Wanjun had told herself standing in a storeroom with Brother Hui at her shoulder and a brass lamp at her feet. It had been a clean story. Clean stories, she had been told once by her father, were the first thing a judge should mistrust.
The lady of the seventh place was neither a clean instrument nor a clean villain. She was a woman of twenty-three who had been pouring her family's apricots into her mouth for six months, writing slips she did not understand to a man she had never met, and who, in seven minutes alone with an apothecary jar, had done a thing she could not, the day after, decide the meaning of.
Wanjun had been writing the wrong woman in her head since dawn.
She set the wrong woman aside. She put a single stone in front of her.
"Sirin."
"Lady."
"You will tell me, this afternoon, two more things, in the order in which I will ask them."
"Yes, lady."
"The first is the name of the middle brother's wife."
"An Bibi, lady."
It was not the name Wanjun had been carrying for the middle brother's wife — and she knew, in the small flat second of the silence after Sirin's answer, that she had been carrying the wrong one. The middle brother's wife in this household was not the niece by marriage she had met at the kitchen worktop this morning. The niece by marriage was the cousin, not the wife. The wife was An Bibi. The wife was the sister of An Naxia and the wife of the middle brother of this house. The wife had been the messenger between the silk-merchant and Sirin.
The wife was also — by Wanjun's reading of the customs filings of the An clan over the past three years — married, by an earlier engagement, into the household of the fanyang general at the northeastern frontier, and was therefore the small specific channel by which a frontier garrison and a Han silk-merchant and a Sogdian compound in the Western Market could be made to share a single dish at a single dinner without either of them knowing the other's table-grammar.
She did not, in this room, in front of Sirin, allow her face to do anything.
She let the inference sit. She would walk it home. She would, this evening, with the door of the caravanserai office bolted, ask An Naxia about his sister.
"The second thing, Sirin."
"Yes, lady."
"You will tell me how the middle brother's wife came to be the one who carried the silk-merchant's apricots to your room. Not the patriarch's wife. Not your own husband's mother. Not the niece by marriage. The middle brother's wife."
Sirin looked at her hands again.
"Because, lady, the middle brother's wife had asked, in the second month I was here, to be the one. She had said, lady, that the small specific work of the seventh-place bride in this household was a work she had been the bride for, in the first year of her own marriage, and that she remembered the small private kindness of the household to her in that year, and wished to pass it on. The patriarch's wife agreed. The work was hers."
"In the second month."
"In the second month, lady."
The middle brother's wife had asked, before any of this had begun, to be the channel between the new bride and the outside. She had set the channel. She had walked it for six months. The household had not noticed because the household had been told the channel was an act of kindness.
The channel was the channel.
Wanjun rose, slowly, in the small careful way she rose in front of a witness she did not want to startle.
"Sirin."
"Lady."
"You will sit, this afternoon, with Madam Khorshid and the naasalar, and you will, before the dusk drum, drink the millet gruel. You will not, this evening, be asked to speak by me or by any other. You will be permitted, by my private arrangement with Lady Datis, the dawn rite at the seventh dawn for your husband and his family. Madam Khorshid will, in the next hour, walk to Lady Datis and request the permission in my name. The lady of the seventh place will perform the libation at the seventh dawn. She will perform it cleanly. The household will go in the proper order. I am not, Sirin, requiring you to tell me anything further today."
Sirin did not look up.
"Lady."
"Yes."
"The story I am telling myself."
"Yes."
"Which is the true one."
Wanjun looked at her, briefly, in the late afternoon light coming through the small high window above the south wall.
"I do not, Sirin, know. You may, in the coming year, know. I will not, this year, decide for you."
Sirin closed her eyes for the count of perhaps four breaths.
"Lady."
"Yes."
"Thank you."
\ \ \*
Outside, at the gate, Madam Khorshid touched Wanjun's sleeve at the wrist — the small specific Persian gesture for attend.
"Lady."
"Madam Khorshid."
"You believed her at I gave them a half-dose."
"I did."
"You did not believe her at I did not know what I was doing."
"I did not entirely."
"And you did not, lady, believe her at I knew what I was doing."
"I did not entirely."
"Then you have done, lady, what an honest investigator does with a witness who has herself not yet decided. You have left her the room. You have not, lady, walked into the room and made the decision for her, which would have been the small specific cruelty of the foreign nun."
"Madam Khorshid."
"Lady."
"The middle brother's wife."
"An Bibi."
"Yes."
"Is, by my own private estimate, in her husband's household at the northeastern frontier as of the tenth day of the third month. She is not, lady, in Chang'an. She has not been in Chang'an for the year. She has been writing, to her relatives in the An compound, in the small private idiom of a young Sogdian woman who married well and who, in her marriage, has not — by the testimony of the niece by marriage to me in the kitchen at the half of the noon hour today — been heard from in three months."
"Three months."
"Three months. The middle brother's wife who, in the second month of Sirin's marriage, asked to be the channel, has been writing to nobody since the new year. The apricots that came to Sirin's room since the new year have not, by Sirin's witness or by mine, come in the same paper or the same weight as they did in the third or fourth month."
"Who has been writing."
"That, lady, is the inner room the broker has asked us not to enter. That is the seventh of the seven doors."
The pomegranate moved in the wind. The small hard fruit on the flagstone rolled the smallest further fraction of a handsbreadth, hit the foot of the water-jar, and stopped.
Wanjun did not, in the courtyard, allow her face to do anything.
She had, at the half of the eighth hour of this morning, in a storeroom in the An compound, told herself the small clean story of a Han silk-merchant carrying out three objects under his coat. She had, at the third hour of this afternoon, in this courtyard, just been told that the silk-merchant had not been writing alone; that the channel between the silk-merchant and the seventh place had been opened, six months ago, by a young Sogdian wife who was no longer in Chang'an; and that the channel had been kept open, since the new year, by a hand that was not the wife's.
She had, this morning, put four stones in front of the small room.
She would, this evening, take three of them away.
She inclined her head.
"Madam Khorshid."
"Lady."
"At the seventh hour. The caravanserai. The matter of the middle brother's wife."
"I will be at the wine-shop. Send Brother Hui."
"Brother Hui."
"Yes. He is, lady, a more legible messenger across that courtyard than I am. I will send a girl to him this evening at the dusk drum."
She did not, this afternoon, smile. She did not, this afternoon, look at Wanjun.
She walked, in the careful unhurried walk of a Persian widow on a private errand, out of the courtyard, past the gate, and into the alley.
Wanjun stood in the courtyard a moment longer.
She bent. She picked up the small hard green pomegranate from the foot of the water-jar. She turned it once in her hand. She put it in her sleeve.
She walked home.