Chapter 20 The Keeper's Hour

Spring came into the Hall through the high window, and with it the smell of the markets and the sound of the swallows under the eaves of the outer court. The Hall had changed. There was a second keeper now — Meng Zhu, made junior keeper of the night in the first month, with a rank and a stool of her own and the right to call the arrow, though Shulan noticed that she had not yet stopped calling it a little too loudly, as girls do when they have been given a thing they want. There was a new rule of the Bureau, written in Pei Zhongyan's own hand: the seventh jar was to be sealed at each filling with a wire about its lip and a drop of wax over the knot, and the wax was to be broken only by the keeper on duty and the pieces kept until the morning. There was a monthly certification instead of a seasonal one, and on those mornings Pei Zhongyan came himself and counted the drip with the measure beside the arrow, and wrote both numbers in the register, and signed, and made the keeper sign, and bowed to her before he left, which no astronomer before him had ever done. There were other changes, the smaller ones, which Shulan noticed more. The boys from the outer court now looked up when she passed. The Hall steward, who for nineteen years had signed whatever was put in front of him, had begun to ask her what she thought before he signed it. Wen Momo's nephew, who carried folded papers for the price of a bowl of noodles, had taken to carrying them without being asked. And once, in the second month, a woman of the inner court whom Shulan had never met came to the door of the Hall and stood there in her silk and her set hair, with a small paper in her hand, and said: "I am told the keeper of the clock can tell whether a document was written on the day it claims." "Sometimes," Shulan said. The woman held out the paper. "My son's marriage contract," she said. "The date on it is my son's wedding day. I would like to be sure." Shulan took the paper and looked at it, and the ink was the ink of the day it claimed, and the hand was the hand of the man whose hand it claimed to be, and she gave it back and said so, and the woman went away satisfied. It was nothing. It was the first time in her life that a person of the inner court had come to her, and it was over nothing, and Shulan stood at the door for a long while after the woman had gone, with the spring light coming in, and found that she was smiling. --- Luo Cheng came in the fourth month, with two kinds of news. The first was good. The eastern relays had returned the recalled almanac sheets, all but three, and the three had written that their sheets had been sent up in the usual bundle and the bundle had been lost, and the Bureau had been directed to print three replacement pages and nail them over the pasted corrections in every relay on the road, so that no copy of the Concordance in the east would carry the false hour into the coming year. The decree was voided. The granary commission was in other hands. Bu Ying had been sent to a frontier garrison, and the smith Pu had been set to mend the public water jars of the western wards for a year, which was, Luo Cheng said, a sentence that a man of the lower court would remember longer than a beating. The second was small, and he told it in a different voice. "A rider came up the eastern road two days ago," he said. "He had a letter from the relay at the ninth station. Nothing in it. A list of the horses, and the arrival times of the ordinary post, and at the end, in the corner, the clerk had written a note to his inspector, saying that he had found a correction in the relay's copy of the Concordance, a paper pasted over the page for the fifth month, and that it was not one of the three sheets the Bureau had printed, and that the hand of it was not the hand of the Bureau's printing office." Shulan set down the measure she had been polishing. "What hand was it?" The corners of Luo Cheng's mouth went down. "Leaning," he said. "The tails of the characters thin and hooked, like the feet of a bird." The drip went on behind them, patient, honest. Shulan stood in the middle of the Hall of Measured Hours with a cloth in her hand and the spring light on the jars, and she thought about a household in the north of the city whose name she had never learned, and about a man in a frontier garrison with a bird's-foot hand, and about how many relays there were on the eastern road, and how many copies of the Concordance stood nailed up above the ward drums from the capital to the coast, each one holding the hours of a whole year, each one a small, printed machine for making people believe what the sky had said. "There is one more thing," Luo Cheng said. "The letter says the correction moves the hour of a rite in the fifth month. A rite that has not been called yet." "I know," Shulan said. She turned back to the Dripping Stair. She had filled the jars at dusk the evening before, as she filled them every evening, and the water had run all night, and the clock had come down the frame one jar at a time the way it had come down every night for hundreds of years, and this morning, when she had read the arrow, the hour had been true. The arrow had been true. The rule had been true. Everything about the clock had been exactly where it was supposed to be. But the third jar, the third from the top, which she had filled with her own hands at dusk, had answered too quickly when she filled it. She had noticed it that morning and had said nothing, because a keeper does not say a thing until she is sure, and she was not sure yet, and she would be sure by the end of the week. Someone had been at the third jar. She picked up the measure and knelt by the frame and put her ear against the bronze, the way Gao Peide had taught her in her first week, the water is the master, and she listened. The third jar dripped. The seventh dripped. The whole staircase dripped and counted and said the hours of the empire, and behind her in the doorway Meng Zhu was coming in with the morning rice, and above her in the high window the spring light lay across the jars, and out beyond the wall of the palace the great city of Chang'an was opening its gates, ward by ward, on a morning the Concordance had called auspicious. Shulan put her ear to the bronze and began, very carefully, to count.