Chapter 2 The Hour of the Third Watch

The chancery court lay on the other side of the wall from the Hall, and Shulan had never been inside it. In eight years she had learned the whole map of the inner rooms, the kitchens, the laundry, the cold sheds where wine was kept, but the outer courts belonged to men with brushes and rank, and a keeper of hours had no business there. She knew the chancery only as a sound: the long, dry rustle of many papers being shifted at once, which carried over the wall on still mornings and sounded like rain on a roof of cloth. That morning the rustle stopped. Shulan carried the receiving bowl to the well and scrubbed it, and while she scrubbed she listened. The inner court had one subject. A secretary of the chancery, a man named Han Qidu, had been found dead in his office at the third watch. He had been sitting upright, they said, with his back against the shelf and his brush laid across the page he had been writing, as though he had put down his work to rest and simply had not got up again. No wound. No blood. His face had not been calm, one of the yard women reported, but nothing about a man's face meant much after a night in a cold room. What the palace cared about was the hour. A secretary of the chancery kept the register of sealed decrees, and a register was not a loose thing. Every decree that left that office was dated with the watch and the mark at which it had been sealed and countersigned, and the date was the spine of it. A man who had countersigned a decree had done so while alive. This was not a subtle point of law. It was the kind of rule that grooms and jar-scrubbers learned the way they learned the shape of the walls. Han Qidu had countersigned a decree the evening before his death, at the fifth watch, at dawn. That was the trouble. He had been found at the third watch — the middle of the night, hours before the dawn when the decree had supposedly passed beneath his brush. A dead man could not sign. And if Han Qidu had been dead when the decree was sealed, then the decree was a forgery, and the seal on it was a lie, and the office that had sent it out was full of men who would very much like the hour of his death to be a different hour. Shulan understood this slowly, standing at the well with the wet bowl in her hands, and when she understood it she felt the cold of the water travel up her arms into her chest. Because she had called the third watch that night. She had read the arrow, and the arrow had said the third watch, and she had said the third watch aloud, and a boy had carried her word to the drum-tower, and the drum had carried it to the whole palace, and every record written between the dark and the dawn had been written in her hour. She stood at the well and tried to remember the number she had called. She could not. That was the thing about a keeper's work. You called a hundred hours a month and forgot every one of them the moment the next came, because the hours were not for you to keep. They were for everyone else to use. --- At the noon bell, Luo Cheng came into the Hall. He was a secretary to the censorate, the office that audited other offices, and he was younger than Shulan had expected from the two men who had come with him and now stood in the doorway as though the room smelled of something. He wore a plain robe and carried a wooden box of the kind clerks used for statements, and he had the flat, patient face of a man who had read a great many documents and believed none of them. "You keep the clock," he said. "I keep the jars," Shulan said. "The clock is the jars." He looked at the Dripping Stair for a while, first at the top jar, then down the leaning frame, then at the receiving bowl and the arrow lying at the morning's last mark. He did not touch anything. That was more than the two men behind him managed. "What was the hour at the third watch last night?" "I called the third watch at the arrow's first mark," she said, which was true, and which was also, she now knew, not the same thing as the hour itself. "Who heard you call it?" "Warden Huang Zhen writes the hours in his book. The boy took my word to the tower. The tower struck. Half the palace heard the tower." Luo Cheng wrote, unhurried. "Did you notice anything wrong with the clock last night? Or this morning?" The question came so plainly that she almost answered it. The seventh jar is fast. The spout is wrong. The clock has been gaining half a mark a night since the autumn. If the clock is fast, then every hour you have recorded is late, and Han Qidu's decree is late, and your forgery falls apart or stands on its own, depending on which way the fast clock pushes it. She opened her mouth. Behind Luo Cheng, in the doorway, stood the two clerks from the censorate, and beyond them, in the yard, a girl from the laundry had stopped with a basket of wet linen to watch. In the corner of the Hall, on his stool, Gao Peide sat with his blind face turned toward the window, listening, saying nothing, his hands folded on his knees. He had been there the whole time. He had heard the question too. "Nothing wrong," Shulan said. Luo Cheng looked at her for a moment. Then he wrote that down as well, and thanked her, and went out, and the Hall was quiet again except for the drip. --- When the clerks were gone, Gao Peide spoke without turning from the window. "You lied." "Yes." "Good." Shulan knelt by his stool. Up close his eyes were milky at the center and clear at the rim, and they did not track her, but his head followed her voice, and he moved his hand until he found her sleeve. "There is a thing you do not know yet," he said. "You think the danger is that they will ask you what the clock said. It is not. The danger is that someone will ask you what the clock should have said, and you will know, and they will see that you know, and then they will decide that the woman who keeps the clock is the woman who moved it." "I did not move it." "You are the only person in this palace who can move it without breaking a seal," he said. "You fill the jars. You clean the spouts. You set the arrow. There is no lock on the seventh jar, Shulan. There is only you." She was silent. "Listen to me," Gao Peide said. "Write down every hour you call, in your own hand, in your own book, from tonight. Not in the palace record. In yours. If the record is what they want, you will need something that is not the record." "The Hall's books are the record." "The Hall's books are the Hall's books. They have stood there for thirty years and anyone may reach them." His grip tightened. "The one you keep in your sleeve is worth more." Shulan had never told him about the little measure in her sleeve, or the notes she made in the margins of her own memory. She had not needed to. He had kept the jars for thirty years before his eyes failed. He knew the shape of a keeper's life. That night, after she had filled the seven jars and lit the wick and called the second mark of the first watch, she took out the tally board that belonged to the Hall and wrote the hour on it for everyone to read. Then she took a scrap of paper from the waist of her robe, and on it, in a hand small enough to fit beneath a thumb, she wrote the hour she had actually counted, the hour the water said, the hour the arrow refused to show. They were not the same hour. The difference was nine breaths. She folded the paper and put it in the hollow inside the ivory rule, under the scale, where the wax stopper had come loose three years ago and no one had ever asked her to mend it. The arrow went on rising. The drip went on counting, honest as a heartbeat, from a jar that was not. ---