Chapter Seven
A Letter Burned at the Third Hour
The caravanserai office at the half of the second hour after noon was, in the late spring, the coolest room in the western quadrant of the market. An Naxia had chosen it for that reason eleven years ago, when his uncle had given him the keys; the room sat against the north wall of the compound, behind a double thickness of mud-brick and a poplar lath, and faced a small inner court that the morning sun did not reach. In summer the room held the temperature of a cellar. In winter it held the temperature of a cellar. He preferred his rooms cold.
He sat at the desk in his under-robe of unbleached cotton and the patched mourning over-robe he had not yet taken off, and he read the letter for the third time.
The letter had come at the dawn drum, by a Liangzhou rider who had not given his name and had not waited for a reply. The letter was written on the pale yellow paper the silk-traders of Liangzhou used for private correspondence, folded in three rather than four, sealed with a small dark wax he did not recognise. The hand was his sister's. The Pahlavi was hers — the small over-rounding of the be, the same idiosyncratic de in the foot, the same habit of running two words together when she was upset.
He had been reading the same five lines for three quarters of an hour. He had, in the three quarters of an hour, drunk one cup of tea, allowed the cup to cool, drunk a second from the pot, and not poured a third.
Brother. The bride at our household table on the night of the spring banquet was not mine, and not Aunt Datis's, and not the girl from Loulan, although the girl from Loulan was at the table. The bride was the cousin of the patron, sent in my name to read my mother's slips before my mother burned them. I did not write the slips after the new year. The slips were written by the patron's cousin. I have not written to the household since. I am not, brother, in Fanyang. I am at the Mati Si in Liangzhou with the sisters. Burn this. Do not ride west. Do not come for me. I am, brother, well.
He had not, on the second reading, burned the letter.
He had not, on the third, burned it.
He set the paper flat on the desk. He set the small brass weight at the upper edge to hold it. He put his hands flat to either side of the weight, palms down, and looked at the paper at the angle a careful reader read a paper that had asked him to do a thing he was not yet ready to do.
The Pahlavi was hers.
The instruction was not.
He had known An Bibi since the morning she had been born; he had carried her on his back from the courtyard to the upper gallery for the first year she had been able to walk; he had sat with her when she was nine and their mother was dying and had told her, in the small careful Persian of their mother's household, that he would not leave her, and had then, in the careful order in which Sogdian elder brothers were obliged to fail their sisters, left her at sixteen by accepting his uncle's posting to Chang'an. He had known An Bibi for twenty-three years. He knew, in the small specific way an elder brother knew, which sentences in this letter she had written and which sentences someone standing over her shoulder had told her to write.
She had written the first sentence.
She had written I did not write the slips after the new year.
She had written the patron's cousin.
She had not written I am at the Mati Si in Liangzhou with the sisters. The Mati Si was eighty li from her household at the fanyang garrison; his sister, even in flight, would not have taken her own writing-paper that distance and asked a stranger to ride it to the Liangzhou courier. She had also never, in any letter to him in seven years, used the phrase the sisters for the Buddhist nuns of any monastery. She would have written the foreign sisters, in the small Sogdian household phrase their mother had used.
The third sentence and the fifth sentence had been written for her.
He set his right hand on the third sentence. He did not lift the paper. He sat for a count of perhaps twenty breaths.
He had, in the eighteen months since the death of his Han friend Cui Yanzhi — the friend whose name he had not yet said aloud to the widow — held a single careful private rule for the management of his sister's marriage. The rule was: do not act on what is told to you. Act on what she does not yet know to ask you for. The rule had been the rule because his sister, in the small narrow life of a Sogdian wife in a frontier military household, would not be permitted to ask him for what she would, in time, need to ask him for. He had been keeping the rule by sending her, four times a year, a small parcel of dried apricots in the same paper at the same weight, on the assumption that one day she would, by the small private channel of the parcel, send him a thing back.
She had, this morning, sent him a thing back.
She had not sent it back from the fanyang garrison.
She had sent it from a Liangzhou rider.
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He stood up. He paced the small narrow length of the office once, in the careful unhurried way he paced when he was thinking, and stopped at the brazier.
The brazier was cold. The brazier had been cold all morning. The brand of the dawn fire — he had refused, this morning, to relight it; he had not, this morning, allowed himself the small private superstition of a Zoroastrian household's brand on a morning he was about to ride west to bring his sister home — sat in the corner of the kitchen yard in a small clay shallow, half-quenched.
He had not, this morning, decided.
He had been telling himself, for two hours, that he had not decided.
The decision had, in fact, been made at the half of the second hour: he was not going to ride. He was going to take this letter, in three quarters of an hour, to the lady Cui in the kitchen door of his uncle's compound, and he was going to tell her — in the slow careful order in which he had learned, in the past two days, to tell her things — that his sister was not in the fanyang household, that the bride who had been writing the slips since the new year was a cousin of the silk-merchant, and that the household had been infiltrated, this winter, by a channel his sister had been unable to close from inside her own marriage.
He was going to tell her this — and not the larger thing, which he had not yet decided how much of to tell her.
The larger thing was: the patron of the silk-merchant. Not the name, which he did not yet know, but the shape of the patron, which he had been carrying in his head for fourteen months. The shape was the shape of a man with private money in three garrisons, a private kiln in the Eastern Market, a private ear in the Censorate, and a private retinue in Chang'an his sister had been told, in the autumn of 749, to be afraid of by name. The shape was not, in his head, a fully-named man yet. It was the shape of a man whose silver moved through frontier paymasters his sister had been forced to know.
He had been afraid, for ten months, that the shape was a man who was not yet on any list Pei kept.
He had been afraid, for two weeks, that the shape was a man Wanjun's husband had been about to name.
He had decided, this morning, at the half of the second hour, that he was not going to tell the lady the shape yet.
He had decided, this morning, at the half of the second hour, that he was going to tell her the cousin of the silk-merchant and the lady of the inner. He was going to tell her about Sirin's channel and the apricots. He was going to tell her about the fanyang paymaster — the name, not the system. He was going to give her two of the four things she had asked him for in the kitchen door.
He was not going to give her the third or the fourth.
He sat down at the desk again. He took up the lid of the small lacquered desk-box he kept for letters that were not for the household. He laid the Liangzhou letter in the box. He closed the box. He set the brass weight back on the desk.
He did not, this hour, burn the letter.
He had told himself, on the first reading, that he would burn it.
He had told himself, on the second, that he would burn it after the third.
He had, on the third, decided that he would not burn it until he had stood in the kitchen door of his uncle's compound and made the lady look at his face — and would then, after looking at her face, decide. He was a careful man. He had, in eleven years of caravan-running, kept the small Persian habit of postponing one decision until the second decision allowed him to make it.
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He took, from the small ceramic dish at the corner of the desk, a single dried date. He chewed it. He did not, this afternoon, eat the second.
He thought of his sister at four, on the upper gallery of the household at Bukhara, when their mother had still been alive and her hair had still been the long heavy plait their mother had braided for her in the mornings. He thought of her at nine. He thought of her at sixteen, the morning of his departure. He thought of her at seventeen, the morning of her own. He thought of her at twenty-two, in the small careful handwriting of a young wife who had, in her first year of marriage, learned not to write what she was thinking but to write the thing the household would permit her to write. He did not allow himself the larger image which had been pressing at the edge of his discipline since the dawn drum: his sister, in the apartments of the fanyang garrison, at a small writing-table, not allowed to put her hand to her own paper.
He did not, this afternoon, allow it.
He stood. He put on his outer mourning robe over the under-robe. He tied his hair back with the same black cord he had tied it back with at the dawn drum. He looked, briefly, at himself in the small bronze mirror that hung on the inside of the office door. The face that looked back was the face he had been wearing in the lady Cui's presence since the morning of the previous day — the careful nothing of a man who had been told by his clan to manage her, and who had, since the kitchen door of this morning, been doing the second thing his clan had not asked him to do, which was the thing he had not yet named to himself.
He had not yet named it.
He would not, this afternoon, name it.
He took, from the inside of the desk, the small folded slip he had prepared at the dawn drum: a single sheet of pale yellow paper, in his hand, in Pahlavi, three lines long. He did not, this afternoon, write the fourth.
Sister. I do not ride. I will, in the small private hand of an elder brother, do the thing you have not yet asked me for. Wait.
He folded the slip. He set it inside the lacquered box on top of her letter. He closed the box.
He picked up his outer-robe at the shoulder, in the small adjusting tug a man gave the cloth before he walked out a door, and stopped.
\ \ \*
He sat down again.
He did not stand up for some minutes.
He had — he registered, in the careful corridor of his own self-management — been, for the past hour, behaving as a man behaved when he was preparing to tell a woman more than he had decided to tell her. The careful slow restraint of the morning had been the small private rehearsal of a man choosing which sentences he was prepared to say aloud. He had, in the rehearsal, found himself this morning unable to think of an order of telling that did not, by the third sentence, hand to the lady Cui the shape of the patron.
He was the third son of an old Sogdian house. He had been trained, by his father and his uncle and his Han tutor and his Nestorian tutor and his mother, in the small careful art of giving a witness less than the witness was asking for. He had been good at the art. He had been good at it in the houses of his uncle's friends, in the offices of the Censorate, in the wineshops of Pingkang, in the embassies at the Honglu Si. He had been good at it for eleven years.
He was, this afternoon, not good at the art.
He had been, for two days, sitting across a kitchen worktop from a woman who had counted, on the morning of the second day, the embroideries on the gallery of his uncle's compound in seven beats of a held breath. He had been, for two days, watching a woman cross the floor of a Sogdian household by a method his uncle had not been able to cross it by in eighteen years of residence. He had been, since the half of the eighth hour of this morning, watching the same woman accept, without flinching, a half-dossier from a man who had given her the wrapper-shape of a third in order to be observed at the giving.
He had been, since the half of the noon hour, telling himself that he could give her the cousin and the channel and the apricots, and withhold the shape.
He was no longer convinced he could.
He had, in eleven years of the careful art, never had the careful art tested by a witness who, in the room across from him, made no effort whatsoever to be careful.
He sat for some minutes with his hands flat on the desk to either side of the brass weight.
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At the half of the third hour, a small junior of the sabao's house — a boy of perhaps nine, in a clean mourning over-robe, whose name he had been told twice and had not yet kept — came to the door of the office with a small folded slip.
"An gongzi."
"Yes."
"From the kitchen of the apartments behind the temple. From the naasalar. He has asked me to walk this to the office at the half of the third hour."
"Thank you."
The boy bowed. The boy left.
He unfolded the slip. It was from the naasalar. It said, in the naasalar's small careful Tang of a man who had been raised in a fire-temple courtyard and had learned to write in his sixtieth year:
Cousin. The seventh dawn rite will be performed for the household at the seventh dawn, by the lady of the seventh place, in the proper order. The lady Cui has asked through Lady Khorshid that the rite be permitted. Lady Datis has agreed. The household will, in the proper order, go.
He read it twice.
He folded it.
He set it on top of the lacquered box.
The slip was not, in its main content, news. The main content was a courtesy from the naasalar informing the household's middle son that the seventh-dawn rite had been arranged for the seventh dawn. It was the small careful Sogdian household practice of telling the surviving son the schedule of his own family's last rite before the rite was, in the household's hearing, announced.
The slip was — in the small private margin of it — news of a different kind.
The slip told him that the lady Cui, in the apartments behind the fire-temple, after the second hour of the afternoon, had sat with Sirin in the second room and had — by Lady Khorshid's intercession and Lady Datis's permission — secured for the lady of the seventh place the right to perform her own household's last rite. The lady Cui had done this without consulting him, without writing to him, without asking through any of the three small Sogdian household channels by which a foreigner in a Sogdian household was expected to make such a request.
She had walked in. She had asked. She had been granted.
He thought, briefly, about her hands at the kitchen door of this morning: the small narrow specific lift of her right index finger from the back of the mare's neck when she had registered, in the small private corridor of her own discipline, the moment of the naasalar's message from the temple two streets away. He had been watching her hand at the time because he had not yet known where to put his own.
He had filed the lift.
He stopped himself at the verb.
He had — he registered, in the small private margin of his own self-keeping — been spending more time, since yesterday morning, watching her hands than he was prepared, this hour, to admit. The hands were not the largest thing he had been watching. They were the easiest. She held her hands in front of her in the careful unhurried way a Han widow of a junior censor's household had been trained to hold them, and the hands did the thing a face did not. The hands had, this morning, in the kitchen door, told him in three small specific lifts and one small specific stillness exactly what she had asked Brother Hui at the well, exactly what Brother Hui had said in the storeroom, and exactly what she had not yet allowed herself to ask him.
He had been watching the hands.
He had — he allowed, in the small private corner — been watching, this morning, at the wrong moment, the small pale specific scar at the inside of her left wrist where the cuff had ridden up against the rein. The scar was the size of a fingerwidth. It was old. It was the scar of a knife-cut, not a needle, and it had been stitched, by whoever stitched it, by a hand that had been in a hurry. He did not, this afternoon, allow himself to ask whose hand had stitched it. He did not, this afternoon, allow himself to ask in what hurry. He had been watching at the wrong moment, in the wrong way, and he had filed the scar.
He had filed the scar.
He set the naasalar's slip down on top of the lacquered box.
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He stood.
He picked up his outer-robe at the shoulder. He adjusted the cloth. He walked, in the careful unhurried walk of a third son of an old Sogdian house, out of the office, across the inner court, through the gate of the caravanserai, into the broad street of the Western Market.
He did not, this afternoon, burn the letter.
He did not, this afternoon, ride for Liangzhou.
He walked, by the slow patient route a man walked when he had been holding three decisions and had let two of them go, toward the kitchen door of the apartments behind the fire-temple.
He would, at the kitchen door, give her the cousin of the silk-merchant and the channel and the apricots. He would, after the kitchen door, walk her back to his uncle's compound for the second sweep with Brother Hui. He would, at the seventh hour, in the office with the door bolted, give her the four pieces she had asked him for at the kitchen door of this morning.
He would not, at any hour today, give her the shape.
He did not, this afternoon, know yet how long he would hold to that.
He did know, by the half of the third hour, walking westward along the broad street of the Western Market in the small clean afternoon air, that what he was holding was not, this afternoon, the careful art of eleven years. It was a smaller thing and a worse-trained thing and a thing he had not, in eleven years, kept.
He walked on.
The dust of the avenue rose in the slow patient way the dust of a Western Market avenue rose at the half of the third hour, in the small private idiom of a city that had not yet, this spring, been ruined.