Chapter Thirteen
Stones for the Han Pig
She did not go to the Cool Vine by the avenue.
She walked the back lanes of Yongchong south to the second eastern gate, the gate the carters used at the half of the seventh hour for the western consignments, and then west along the back of the southern wards to the rear lane of Pingkang. The walk took her perhaps an hour and a quarter. She had set out at the half of the sixth hour. The light, by the time she reached the lane behind the Lane of the Wagtail, was the long thin amber of a late spring afternoon that had not yet decided to be evening.
The Cool Vine was the third gate on the rear lane.
Madam Khorshid did not, this evening, receive at the front. The front would have been the front for a poet, or a junior censor at his second cup, or a Han merchant who wished to be seen drinking in the famous wineshop of the Persian woman with the four languages. The rear gate was the gate for a Daoist nun of Yongchong who had walked through the back lanes for an hour and a quarter and did not, this evening, wish her arrival to be known on the avenue. The rear gate gave onto a small inner yard with a single grape-vine trained at the back wall, three clay wine-jars sealed at the lid, and a narrow door that opened into Madam Khorshid's own private back room — the room where her ledger sat on the desk and her own brazier kept the cushion-rugs warm and where she received the four kinds of visitor she did not wish to receive in any room a passing client might walk through.
Madam Khorshid was at the brazier.
She was, this evening, in a Persian under-robe of the colour of dried rosehip, with a plain linen wrap at her hair and the small silver pin her mother had given her at fifteen. She was tending the brazier with a long iron poker she did not, in Persian or in Tang, allow her younger girls to touch.
"Lady."
"Madam."
"You came by the back."
"I came by the back."
"You did not, lady, wish to be seen on the avenue this evening."
"I did not."
"Sit."
She sat.
Madam Khorshid took the kettle from the brazier and set it on the cushion-stone at the corner of the rug. She did not, this evening, pour wine. She took, from the wall-shelf, a small pot of barley tea and a single celadon cup. She poured the tea.
"Lady. The wine, this evening, is for the front. The barley is for the room."
"Yes."
"You have decided, lady, that the evening is for an account."
"I have."
"Lu Zhongming, this morning, named three Manichaean lay-cell elders at the second-day audience."
"He did."
"He did not, this morning, name me."
"He did not."
"He will, lady, name me in the morning of the fourth day."
"He may."
"He will."
Madam Khorshid set the kettle back on the brazier. She drew, from the inside of her sleeve, a small folded slip of paper, and laid it on the rug between them.
"That slip, lady, is the private ledger of the proprietress of the wineshop Sparrow's Tail, who has — by the testimony of her own kitchen-boy this afternoon — laid down, in the half of the noon hour, three taels of silver for a private courtesy to be paid at the half of the fifth hour to a runner of Lu Zhongming's office. The runner, lady, by the kitchen-boy of the Sparrow's Tail, carried in his sleeve a slip of paper. The slip of paper, lady, by the kitchen-boy at his second cup of millet wine, contained the names of three Sogdian wineshops in Pingkang. Of the three, by the kitchen-boy at his third cup, the first was the Cool Vine."
"Three taels."
"Three taels. The proprietress of the Sparrow's Tail, lady, is a woman who has been at her rivalry with me for eleven years. Three taels, lady, is the price of an eleven-year rivalry consummated in a single afternoon."
"Madam Khorshid."
"Lady."
"You will, this evening, not return to the Cool Vine after the dusk drum."
"I will not."
"You will, this evening, go to the small chamber at the back of Princess Yuzhen's abbey at the dusk drum. Lady Wei Wan has, this afternoon, by my own hand at the dawn drum, set the small chamber for you. You will, until the case is closer to closing, be at the abbey."
"Lady."
"You will leave the wineshop in the hands of your cousin."
"I will leave the wineshop in the hands of my cousin. The wineshop, lady, will continue in the trade. The trade does not, in this season, depend on me at the brazier."
"It does, madam. We will pretend it does not."
Madam Khorshid inclined her head a finger's width.
"Lady. There is the matter of the account."
"Yes."
"You came, this evening, for the account."
"I came for it."
She set her cup down.
\ \ \*
The account took two hours.
Madam Khorshid told it the way she told her accounts to her own ledger, in slow even sentences, with the pauses of a woman who was, in the telling, also listening for the second-floor footsteps of any client who might have come up the front stair without her knowing.
The account began in the autumn of 748.
A Sogdian wine-merchant of the Western Market — a man named Anvar, of a clan related by marriage to the An clan's middle branch — had been overheard, in a back room of the Cool Vine, in the third hour of an autumn night, refusing a request. The request had been made by the brother of the An household's then-living patriarch, a man named An Bolong who had died in the autumn of 749 in the manner the Tang Code's idiom called a fever. The request had been that Anvar arrange the onward-shipment, from a Liangzhou consignment, of forty jin of uncut Khotanese stone declared at the Chang'an weighhouse as imperial-kiln pigment. Anvar had refused. Anvar had used, in refusing, a Sogdian phrase Madam Khorshid had been holding in her own ledger for the eighteen months since.
The phrase, in the Bukharan dialect, was we do not carry stones for the Han pig.
The Han pig was not, in Sogdian merchant slang, an ethnic insult. The Han pig was the merchant's term for a Han principal who took more than his market share from a Sogdian wholesaler — a man who ate, in the merchant idiom, more than he had paid for. The phrase was old. It had been used, by Madam Khorshid's grandfather in the second generation, against a Tang official at Liangzhou who had set a customs rate so high it had broken three Sogdian houses. It was the phrase a Sogdian merchant used when he wished to refuse, in private, the business of a man whose terms were not the terms of the market.
Anvar had used it in a back room of the Cool Vine in the autumn of 748.
The man Anvar had used it about had not, at the time, been named in the room.
The man Anvar had used it about had been named in a back lane, two months later, by Anvar's younger cousin, who had been at the same back room as a serving-boy at fourteen, and had — by way of an apprentice's pallet Madam Khorshid had quietly arranged at the Cool Vine for the winter of 748 — repaid the keeping with a single name.
"Lady. The cousin was fifteen at the naming. The cousin is, this season, in Liangzhou with his uncle's caravan. The cousin will not, lady, be brought to a Tang court. The cousin has, in the past eighteen months, been kept at a careful distance from any reckoning of the Han pig. I have kept him. I have, lady, paid for the keeping out of the wineshop's own account."
"Madam Khorshid."
"Lady."
"The name."
"The name, lady. The name the cousin gave me at the second night of the lunar new year of 749 was the name of a Han silk-merchant of the second-grade license, whose storefront the cousin had walked past four times in the autumn of 748, and whose face the cousin had — in the back lane of Pingkang at the second watch — seen accompanying the An household's middle brother to the gate of Anvar's compound in the autumn night of the refusal."
She did not, in the back room of the Cool Vine, allow her face to do anything.
"The name, madam."
"Zhang Cong. Of the second lane of the Eastern Market. The storefront with the new lacquer."
She set down the small celadon cup she had not, in the last quarter of an hour, lifted to her lips.
She held the silence in the back room for the count of perhaps twenty breaths.
She did not look at Madam Khorshid. She looked at the brazier. The fire in the brazier was the steady amber of a charcoal-fire that had been tended in the slow patient hand of a woman who knew that a brazier in a wineshop's back room was not a brazier for warming visitors but a brazier for keeping the second pot of barley tea at the right edge of the cushion-stone.
She turned her head.
"Madam Khorshid."
"Lady."
"You have held this name for sixteen months."
"I have."
"You did not, in the eighteen months of the lady Cui's widowhood, bring this name to her gate."
"I did not. I held it, lady, for the day the lady Cui walked into the back room of the Cool Vine in her own grey, on her own feet, and asked for the account. I had set the day, lady, as the day the lady Cui would, in her own time, ask. The day was not, lady, for me to set."
"Madam Khorshid."
"Lady."
"You knew my husband."
"I knew him, lady. He was, in the third year of his marriage, the man who, by a quiet courtesy on my own account, paid the proprietress of my contract the second silver tael of the four I had been short. The proprietress of my contract closed the contract that month. I have not, in the seventeen years since, allowed your husband's name to be spoken at this wineshop. The wineshop, lady, has not been a wineshop in which his name has been a name."
She inclined her head.
She did not, in the back room of the Cool Vine at the half of the eighth hour of the evening of the fourth day, allow her face to do anything.
"Madam Khorshid."
"Lady."
"I am obliged."
"You are not, lady. The obligation is the other way. It has been the other way for seventeen years. The seventeen years, lady, have run on."
She did not answer.
The kettle on the brazier whistled, once, in the brief soft way a Persian kettle whistled in a back room.
Madam Khorshid lifted it. She poured a second cup. She set it in front of Wanjun.
"Lady. Drink."
She drank.
\ \ \*
An Naxia arrived at the rear gate at the third quarter of the eighth hour.
Madam Khorshid let him in at the side of the small inner yard. He came in his own grey, not in mourning white — he had changed, by his own quiet account at the threshold, at the half of the eighth hour, after delivering at the An caravanserai's senior steward's desk the list of the four hands who kept the Liangzhou waxed parchment. The four had become, by the half of the seventh hour, five — the kitchen-master's apprentice having admitted, at the third question, that he had been buying the parchment in a private sub-quantity for a Liangzhou rider whose name he did not know. The fifth hand was, by the apprentice's reading, a hand he did not himself know either.
He bowed at the threshold.
"Lady Cui."
"An gongzi."
"Madam Khorshid."
"Brother."
He did not sit. He stood at the threshold with his hands at his sleeves and his eyes at the rug between them.
"Lady. I have, this evening, two matters."
"Two."
"The first, lady, is the matter of the parchment. The senior steward of the caravanserai kitchen yard kept the parchment in a sealed wax pot in his under-room. The pot has, this afternoon, been opened. The pot has, lady, lost a quantity that the steward did not — by his own reading of his quarterly ledger — at any hour record himself as having issued. The quantity is twelve sheets. The twelve sheets, lady, are the kind of quantity a steward's apprentice would not have taken without noting. The twelve sheets, lady, are the kind of quantity a man who came to the under-room when the steward was at his second meal would have taken."
"Who came to the under-room when the steward was at his second meal."
"Lady. The steward, by his own reading of his ledger, takes his second meal at the half of the seventh hour. The under-room is, at the half of the seventh hour, attended by no one. The under-room is, at the half of the seventh hour, accessible from the kitchen yard by way of the side door of the second storeroom. The side door, lady, is the door an unaccompanied caravan-master would have used."
"You are telling me, gongzi, that you yourself have access."
"I have."
"As do the four hands."
"As do the four hands. And one of the four hands, lady, takes his own second meal at the half of the seventh hour by way of a private appointment in Pingkang with a Han wine-merchant of the Eastern Market."
"Which of the four."
"The kitchen-master from Liangzhou."
He stood very still. He did not, at the threshold, allow his eyes to leave the rug.
She watched him.
She watched him for the count of perhaps four breaths.
She had been watching him, this evening, in the brief glance from the cushion at his hands and at the way they sat at his sleeves and at the angle of his shoulders against the rear gate. She did not allow the watching to do anything in her face. She allowed it to register, in the careful corridor where she kept her observations of him, beside the other observations she had been setting down since the morning of the second day.
He had stood at the threshold for the count of perhaps eight breaths without sitting.
He had not, this evening, asked her any question about Bashang.
He had not asked her any question about the cuff.
He had, instead, brought her the parchment count.
She did not yet know what the parchment count meant.
She allowed the not-knowing.
"An gongzi."
"Lady."
"The second matter."
"Lady."
"I am asking."
He inclined his head a finger's width.
"The second matter, lady, is the matter of the pass."
He drew, from the inside of his over-robe, a small folded slip of pale grey paper. He set it on the rug.
It was a Gold Bird Guard pass for the third watch.
It bore the seal of the Western Market post and a date in the careful hand of a senior pass-clerk. It permitted the bearer to walk the avenue of Vermilion-Bird between the third arcade and the eastern gate of Yongchong Ward, in the appointed hours of the third watch, on the quarterly authority of a senior pass-clerk's stamp.
She did not, on the slip, allow her hand to lift it.
"An gongzi."
"Lady."
"The pass is forged."
"It is."
"You knew when you brought it."
"I knew."
"You are offering to walk me home, by the avenue, after the dusk drum."
"I am."
"I have not asked."
"You have not, lady. I am offering nevertheless. The back lanes, at the third watch, will be patrolled by the four runners Lu Zhongming has, this afternoon, placed at the second eastern gate of Pingkang. The runners, lady, will not stop a Daoist nun on a forged Gold Bird pass on the avenue. They will stop a Daoist nun on the back lane."
She did not answer for the count of three breaths.
She had registered the forged pass. She had registered the precision of its preparation — the seal at the right corner in the dry wax of a Western Market clerk, the date in the hand of the senior pass-clerk himself — and the speed at which it had been prepared. She had registered, also, that he had not brought it as a request. He had brought it as an offer, set on the rug, to be lifted by her own hand or to be left where it lay.
She did not yet know who had prepared the pass. She did not yet know whether it had been prepared by a Western Market clerk who took private commissions from a Sogdian caravan-master, or by a Sogdian caravan-master who had a private clerk in the Western Market's pass-office, or by some other hand. She did not yet know which of these readings was the reading she was meant to be making this evening.
She allowed the not-knowing.
"An gongzi."
"Lady."
"You will, this evening, walk me to the eastern corner of the third arcade. Not to my gate."
"Lady."
"At the third arcade you will, gongzi, turn west. You will not, in the third watch, walk the avenue past the third arcade in my company."
He inclined his head.
"Lady."
"Madam Khorshid."
"Lady."
"You will, at the dusk drum, walk in the back lane to the abbey. The brother at the abbey gate has, by Lady Wei Wan's word this afternoon, been told of your arrival. He will not, at the gate, ask for your name."
"Lady."
She rose.
She did not, in rising, look at An Naxia. She did not, in rising, look at the forged pass on the rug.
She walked to the rear gate. She stepped through it.
He followed at the unspoken half-pace of a man walking behind a Daoist nun who had not, this evening, given him permission to walk beside her.
\ \ \*
The avenue of Vermilion-Bird at the third watch was the colour of a quiet brazier.
The elms had lost the day's grey-green to a dim charcoal. The lanterns at the second and third arcades were lit. A pair of Gold Bird guardsmen at the second arcade stood at their post in the careful unmoving stillness of men who had, by the middle of the third watch, decided that the third watch had not, this night, asked anything of them.
She walked at the unhurried slow pace of a Daoist nun on the half-quarter of a curfew pass.
He walked behind her.
She did not, on the avenue, turn her head. She did not look at the elms. She did not look at the lanterns. She set her eyes at the paving four paces ahead of her own feet and walked.
He did not speak.
At the third arcade, at the corner where the avenue gave onto the eastern road into Yongchong, she stopped.
She did not, at the corner, turn.
"An gongzi."
"Lady Cui."
"Thank you."
"Lady."
"You will, in the morning, by Brother Hui's hand at the third hour, send word of the fifth hand of the parchment."
"I will."
"You will not, gongzi, in the morning, send word of the senior steward."
"I will not."
"Good night."
"Good night, lady."
She walked east into the lane that led to her own gate. She did not, on walking, look back. She did not, on walking, allow herself to hear his step at the avenue behind her.
She heard, nevertheless, the soft retreat of his step as he turned west at the corner of the third arcade.
She counted the count of his step until it was gone.
She walked the lane to her gate.
\ \ \*
Nanny Zhou was at the inner door.
She had been at the inner door, by the soft warm fold of her under-robe sleeve and the faint paste of barley flour at her left wrist, since at least the dusk drum. She had not, this evening, gone to her own pallet.
"Mistress."
"Nanny."
"You are home."
"I am."
"You walked the avenue."
"I walked the avenue."
"In a Gold Bird pass."
"In a Gold Bird pass."
"By the An gongzi's hand."
"By his hand."
"Mistress."
"Nanny."
She walked past the inner door and into the writing-room. The lacquered letter-box was on the corner of the writing-desk where she had set it at the dawn drum. The wax tablet with the diagram was beside it.
She set her hand on the corner of the box.
She did not open it.
Nanny Zhou came as far as the door of the writing-room. She did not, this evening, step inside.
"Mistress."
"Nanny."
"There is a thing I have not, mistress, said in eighteen months."
She did not lift her hand from the box.
"Nanny."
"The dead lady of the An compound — the patriarch's lady, mistress, of the seven dead — her husband, mistress, wrote you a letter once. From Hexi."
She did not, at the box, allow her face to do anything.
"He wrote it, mistress, in the autumn of 748. By a Hexi rider, by way of the second eastern gate, by the runner of my own brother's grain-cart who had carried the letter from the rider at the second post-station outside the city. The runner gave the letter to me. I, mistress — I did not give the letter to you."
"Nanny."
"I did not, mistress. I gave the letter, in the autumn of 748, to the master."
She inclined her head a finger's width.
"To the master."
"To the master, mistress. To Yanzhi. In his own study, by his own desk, at the second hour of the morning of the day the letter arrived. The master read it. The master, mistress, took the letter to his own writing-box. The master did not, mistress, tell you."
She did not lift her hand from the lacquered letter-box.
She did not, in the writing-room at the third quarter of the third watch, allow her face to do anything.
"Nanny."
"Mistress."
"You will, in the morning, by the dawn drum, tell me where my husband's writing-box is now."
"Mistress. I have, in the autumn of 749, by my own hand, set the writing-box in the lacquered letter-box on the corner of the master's desk."
She held her hand on the box.
She did not lift it. She did not, this evening, open it. She did not allow her face to do anything.
Nanny Zhou inclined her head.
"Mistress. I have kept the kettle warm. There is barley tea. There is rice."
"Yes."
"Mistress."
"Yes."
She heard Nanny Zhou step back from the door. She heard the door close. She heard the cistern in the inner court trickle in the quiet of the third watch.
She lifted her hand from the box.
She did not, this evening, open it.
She sat at the writing-desk.
She set both hands flat to the wood on either side of the box.
She held them there.