Chapter 5 Scribes of the Coldwell

The way out of the inner court was the soap cart. Twice a week a woman came in through the north gate with a cart of lye soap and washing ash and took away the court's dirty linen, and twice a week she came back with it clean. Her name was Wen Momo, and she was a widow, and she had a laundry yard in Willow Canal Ward by the Coldwell, and she had been coming and going through the north gate for nineteen years. Everyone at that gate knew her. Everyone at that gate knew that the guards drank her tea and that she told them the news of the city, and that the news of the city was worth more than the soap. Shulan found her in the yard behind the kitchens, loading wet sheets into the cart. She put her hand on the cart's rail. "I need to go out with you." Wen Momo did not stop working. She was a broad woman with forearms like a smith's and a face that gave away nothing it did not choose to. "You have never once asked me for anything," she said. "Not even the good soap." "I need to go to the Coldwell." "On a keeper's errand?" "On my own errand." Wen Momo lifted a sheet, folded it, laid it in the cart. She looked at the sky, at the position of the sun over the north wall, which was a thing she did the way other people looked at their hands. "There is a coat on the nail behind the door," she said. "It will be big on you. Keep your hair down. Do not look up at the gate, and if anyone speaks to you, you are my niece from the country and you are simple, and you have never been inside a palace in your life." Shulan took the coat. It smelled of ash and lemon and a little of wet wool. She put it on and pulled her hair down over her face, and when the cart rolled out of the north gate she was sitting on the tail of it with a bundle of sheets in her lap, and the guard on the gate was telling Wen Momo about his brother's bad foot. --- The city came at her all at once. She had been born in a village south of the capital and had come to the palace at fourteen, and in the twenty-four years since she had seen the inside of the city only a handful of times, on the two feast days when the inner servants were let out to the temples. She had forgotten what it was: the human river of it, the carts and the wheelbarrows and the men carrying poles across their shoulders with baskets swinging at each end, the smell of bean oil and donkeys and coal smoke and something sweet turning on a spit in a stall. The ward walls rose on both sides, higher than they had looked from the cart at first, and above them the tiled roofs of the great houses stood in ranks like the backs of cattle. Wen Momo's yard was a square of packed earth behind a wall in Willow Canal Ward, with a well at one side and lines of linen strung between poles, and from it you could hear the Coldwell, which was not one well but a market that had grown up around one, where the ward women went to buy greens and fish and to stand and talk until the ward gate drum told them to go home. "My brother works at the relay by Millet Gate," Shulan said. "The little clerk in the blue coat who came to the yard in the spring and owed you three cash." "He does not owe me three cash." "You said he owed you three cash." "He repays me in other ways." "He will repay you in other ways," Wen Momo said, and laughed, and gave her the directions. --- Millet Gate Relay stood in the curve of the street just inside the ward gate, a low building of mud brick with a stable behind it and a plastered wall on which someone had painted, many years ago, a horse. A relay was where the imperial letters stopped to change horses and to be stamped with the hour of their arrival, and because a letter's hour mattered, every relay in the empire kept its own clock. Not a Dripping Stair of seven jars, nothing so fine; a single jar and a bowl and a float, and a keeper who filled it each evening and wrote the hour on the back of every letter that passed. Her brother came out of the relay at the sight of her and stopped in the middle of the street with his mouth open. "Shulan." "Xiaode." "You are wearing a laundry coat." "It is a long story." "You are not allowed out." "I am allowed out on errands," Shulan said, which was true in the sense that she could not be punished for something no rule explicitly forbade, and false in the sense that everything about her being here would have been punished if anyone had caught her. --- They sat on the edge of the horse trough in the shade of the relay wall, and she gave her brother a question instead of an explanation, because a question was cheaper and he had always liked questions better. "Your relay clock. Does it run true?" Xiaode wiped his hands on his trousers. He was two years younger than she was and had a round, anxious face and ink under his fingernails. "As true as any. We set it at sunrise off the shadow stick and we write the arrival hour of every letter. It gains a breath or two a week, but the clerk before me ran it fast for a month and the inspector never noticed, so I ran it slow the next month to make it up, and now it is honest and I am careful." "You ran it slow to make it up." "To balance the year's book. It is what they teach. The relay inspector adds the drift and divides it by the season." "How far out did the clerk before you run it?" Xiaode thought. "A mark a night, maybe. He was lazy. He could not be bothered to clear the spout." A mark a night. Shulan felt the trough's stone edge under her fingers and did not move. A mark a night, and nobody noticed, because the relay clock was only ever checked against the sun at sunrise, and by sunrise the drift had to be enormous before it showed. "Xiaode," she said. "I need the arrival times of every letter that came into this relay in the last two months. Not the hour you wrote. The hour the clock showed. Both, if you have both." "Why?" "Because your clock is the only other clock that was awake in this city on the ninth day of the tenth month," she said. Xiaode looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at the street, at the ward gate, at the horse standing in the relay doorway with its head down, the way a man looks at ordinary things when something unordinary has just entered the conversation. "Shulan," he said carefully. "What is this?" "It is a wrong hour," she said. "And it is worth more than we are, and I need a second clock to prove it was wrong, and yours is the nearest one that no one in the palace has ever heard of." He sat there with his hands on his knees and his round face going slowly pale. Then he got up and went into the relay, and came back with a bundle of papers tied with string, and put them in her hands the way a man puts a hot dish in someone else's hands. "Take them before I think about it," he said. "And Shulan. When they find out you did this, do not tell them it was me." ---