Chapter 7 A Copyist's Hand

Pei Zhongyan took her to a back room of the print shed and closed the door. The room was small and hot and full of paper, and on the table between them lay a stack of uncorrected Concordance pages, still damp, their edges curling. He did not offer her a seat. She did not ask for one. "You came to the premises of the Bureau of Sky-Reckoning dressed as a washerwoman," he said, "and you read the corrections on the wall. Tell me why I should not have you taken to the gate." "Because you know what I read." "I know what is on those pages. I signed them." "Then you know what the third one is." Pei Zhongyan looked at her for a long moment. Then he did something she had not expected: he sat down, heavily, and put his inked hands flat on the table and stared at them. "I did not sign the corrections," he said. "I signed the certification of the Hall's clock. At the end of the season, as the office requires. Two astronomers go in, they watch the clock, they compare it to the shadow line, they sign. It is a formality. The clock is the finest instrument in the empire and it does not need us to bless it." "And this season?" "This season I went alone, because the second astronomer was sick. I watched the clock. It seemed true." "Did you count the drip?" Pei Zhongyan's head came up. "Count the drip," he repeated. "The arrow is a servant," Shulan said, and heard Gao Peide's voice come out of her own mouth. "The water is the master. A clerk may look at an arrow all morning and sign any paper you put in front of him. But if you put a measure under the seventh spout and count, you will not sign it. So I ask again. Did you count the drip?" Silence. The ink smell was very thick in the little room. "No," Pei Zhongyan said at last. "I did not count the drip." He got up and went to the door and opened it and looked out into the shed, at the men laying paper and lifting it, and then he shut the door again and came back, and his face had changed, though Shulan could not have said in what way. "The corrections were brought to my director," he said. "They came from the chancery register. My director entered them and set the seal and required the printing office to paste them in before the sheets left the shed. I asked why a hand-written page should be sealed across a printed one, since in twenty years no correction has ever been urgent enough to break the rule that corrections are printed whole in the next run. My director told me it was a matter of the throne's convenience, and that the throne's convenience was not mine to weigh." "Your director is—" "Cui Yuanheng." He said the name without expression. "I am his junior, and I have been his junior for eleven years, and in those eleven years he has been right about the sky every time, which is why I am still here. The stars do not care who is right. Men do." Shulan thought about this. "If I can show you a thing your own eyes can check," she said, "will you check it?" "That depends on the thing." "A seal." Pei Zhongyan's eyebrows rose a fraction. "You have a seal?" "I have the seal on the correction," she said. "It is on the wall. I have every chancery paper that ever came into the Hall. And I know a man in the Western Market who cuts seals, and he will tell me in one breath whether the correction's seal was pressed from bronze or cut from a rubbing." For the first time since she had met him, Pei Zhongyan looked at her as though she were a person and not a problem. "Who taught you to think like this?" he asked. "A blind man," Shulan said. "And a clock that would not stop." --- The seal-cutter had his stall at the far end of the Western Market, in the shadow of the great wall, where the silversmiths and the curio dealers sat and the smell of the spice stalls did not reach. He was an old man with a jeweler's glass screwed into one eye and a bench of steel gravers laid out in a row from thick to thin. Shulan brought him two impressions: one from a chancery decree of the spring, which she had found in the Hall's shelf of old papers, and one copied by her own hand that morning from the correction on the shed wall, which she had done by wetting a scrap of paper on her tongue and pressing it to the seal, an act so small and so quick that she was fairly sure it had not been seen. The seal-cutter looked at the two scraps for a long time. Then he set down his glass and rubbed his eye. "The first one is bronze. Old bronze. It has a drop in it, see, the corner of the second stroke, a flaw, very old. That seal was struck, dropped, and used for twenty years." "And the second?" The old man put the glass back to his eye and turned the scrap to the light. He was quiet so long that Shulan began to hear the market behind her, the bargaining and the bells of the curio dealer's shop. "Cut," he said. "Cut how?" "Bronze, but fresh. The strokes are too clean in the places where an old seal goes soft, and soft in the places where an old seal stays clean, which is the mark of a man copying a rubbing and not of a man cutting from the character. The graver went where the paper told him, not where the brush would." He tapped his thumbnail on the barb under the second stroke. "And this. This here is a mistake. He did not mean to put it in." "How do you know?" "Because a seal-cutter who meant it would have cut it into the rubbing first and copied it with the rest," the old man said, with the particular scorn of a craftsman for a botched job. "This one he added at the end, freehand, thinking his hand was better than it is. Every copyist makes one stroke on his own. That is the stroke that hangs him." --- Shulan walked back through the market with the two scraps wrapped in cloth against her ribs, and the sky over the roofs was going the color of the porcelain in the curio dealer's window, and the ward drum began in the distance, one drum, then another, then the whole city turning like a great animal toward its evening. She had a flaw, and a barb, and a second clock, and a strip of pine. It was, she thought, enough to hang a man. It was not enough to hang the man who had hired him, and she did not yet know who that was, and she had the terrible feeling that she would not be permitted to find out, because in this city the kind of truth she was carrying could not be walked up to a gate in a laundry coat, and the only doorway its equal was one she could not open. ---