Chapter 17 The Long Watch

By the founding rule of the Bureau, the state clocks were certified on the morning of the winter solstice, and the certification night belonged to the officer in charge of the instrument. That meant Shulan spent the last night before the solstice in the Hall, as she had spent a thousand nights before it, except that on this night there were four other people in the room and none of them were asleep. Meng Zhu filled the jars. Shulan set the arrow and read the rule and called the watches aloud, and each time she called one, Luo Cheng wrote it in the censorate's book, standing at the end of the table with his brush and his inkstone, and each time he had finished writing, he said the hour back to her, out loud, so that the room heard it twice from two mouths. Huang Zhen sat by the inner door on a stool with his keys at his belt and his hands in his sleeves. And in the corner, on the bench, with a blanket over his knees and a cup of boiled water beside him because Ba Shouyi had forbidden him any medicine at all, sat Gao Peide, awake, his blind face turned toward the drip. At the second mark of the second watch, Gao Peide said, "There will be someone." "I know," Shulan said. "You have left the door unbarred." "The door is barred. The inner gate is not, and I cannot bar it, because the warden's keys are the warden's keys." She looked at Huang Zhen. Huang Zhen looked back at her with his mild, unreadable face and said nothing at all. At the third mark of the second watch, Luo Cheng set down his brush and stretched his fingers and said, quietly, "If no one comes, we will have spent the night for nothing, and I will have to write in the book that a keeper filled her jars and nothing happened." "Then you will have written a true book." "I have written true books before," Luo Cheng said. "They are the ones nobody reads." --- The man came at the second mark of the third watch. The inner door opened without a sound, which meant the gate had been unlocked by someone with a key, and Shulan, sitting by the bowl with her hands in her lap, heard the footsteps before she saw the man: soft, shuffling, the steps of a person who works indoors and walks without wanting to be heard, and behind them the small metal whisper of tools in a cloth. He came around the frame into the light of the single wick, and he was an old man in a repair-shop coat with a leather roll under his arm, and he stopped when he saw the room, and he stood there with his mouth a little open, looking from Shulan to Meng Zhu to Luo Cheng to the warden on his stool to the blind man on the bench, and the leather roll came apart in his hands and two tools fell on the floor, a punch and a small hammer, and they rang on the boards. Nobody moved. "Close the door," Luo Cheng said. The man closed the door. He was breathing hard, and his hands were shaking, and he was looking at Huang Zhen, not at the others, which told Shulan the last thing she needed to know about how he had come in. "Your name," Luo Cheng said. "Pu," the man said. "Pu the instrument-smith. I work in the lower court of the Bureau. I mend the bronze." "You have been here before." "Twice before." The smith's voice cracked. "Three times. Four. I was told to work at night and I was told the jar was out of true and I was told it by a clerk of the office, and I was paid in coin from the register's account, and I have a wife and there is nothing in the lower court for a man of my age but the mending of cracked brass—" "Sit down," Luo Cheng said. "Put the tools on the table. Now tell the warden and me what you were told to do tonight." The smith sat. His hands went on shaking, and he put them under his knees. "To close the mouth of the seventh jar to what it was before," he said. "Three or four strokes with the punch, working the bronze in. I did it four nights already, a little at a time, and tonight I was to finish it, so that by morning the mouth would be a reed's width again." He swallowed. "And there was a second thing tonight. He told me there was a sliver of something under the arrow, a piece of wood, and that I was to take it out and burn it, and that I was not to speak of it to anyone, and that if I did the thing properly he would have me moved from the lower court to a bench in the foundry with my own apprentice." Shulan closed her eyes. The shim. They had remembered the shim, at last, on the last night, and if this old man with his two tools had come into the Hall an hour later than he had, or if she had gone to bed with the others, or if she had not spent the month learning to count the drift of a clock in the letters of a relay, the morning would have found the seventh jar true and the arrow clean and nothing in the world to show that a night in the tenth month had been made long. "Sit there," Luo Cheng said to the smith. "You will not be charged tonight. You will sit there until sunrise, and at sunrise you will watch what is done, and then you will say what you have said now, in the Bureau's own room, in front of the Bureau's own register of instruments." He picked up his brush. "Warden. Who unlocked the gate?" Huang Zhen stood up. "I did," he said. "Why?" "Because for nineteen years the lower court has sent men in at night to tend the bronze, and for nineteen years I have opened the gate for them, and I did not know until tonight what the bronze was for." He looked at Shulan. "It is not an excuse. It is a fact, and the censorate may write it down, and I will sign it." "You may have cost this woman her life," Luo Cheng said. "No," said Huang Zhen. "I may have cost her a month. She was going to walk into the morning alone, and I have decided, tonight, in this room, that she will not." --- Dawn came late, as it does at the solstice, and the sky beyond the high window went from black to iron to a grey cold enough to see your breath in. Shulan filled the sixth jar for the last time and wiped the lip of the seventh with her thumb. The punch and the hammer lay on the table in plain sight. The smith sat on the floor with his back against the shelf and his eyes on nothing. Gao Peide had fallen asleep at last with the blanket round his knees and his blind face turned up. At the door, at the first footfall in the court outside, Shulan stood up. They were coming now: the astronomers of the Bureau with their instruments in their carrying cases, and the recorder of the censorate, and behind them, if the world were to go the way it had always gone, the director of the Bureau of Sky-Reckoning in his heron-grey silk, who had told her in his own room that the clock must be true, and who would stand four paces from the seventh jar and watch the arrow climb to meet the sun. ---