第11章 Men in Silk

The summons came on the fourteenth day, in the afternoon, by way of Huang Zhen, who came to the Hall himself and stood in the doorway and said only: "The director of the Bureau would like to see the keeper of the clock." Shulan had been expecting it since Han Qidu died. It was a comfort, in its way, to have it come. Two men walked her through the inner courts and out into the west of the palace, where the Bureau of Sky-Reckoning had its offices in a long low building with a terrace on the roof and a great bronze armillary on the terrace, and where men in dark robes stood in the courtyards with their hands behind their backs and their faces turned up at the sky even when the sky was empty. It was a building of paper and orders, and it smelled of ink and of the sweet smoke of the lamps, and every corridor had a copy of the Concordance nailed to its wall, opened to the current month. Cui Yuanheng's room was on the upper floor of the west wing, with a window that looked out over the roofs toward the great wall. He was a small, neat, immaculate man of about sixty, with a scholar's flat shoulders and a scholar's soft hands, and he rose when she came in and bowed to her exactly as he would have bowed to a visiting official. He wore silk the color of a heron's wing, and there was nothing on his table but one book, closed, and a cup of tea that had gone cold. "Keeper Yan," he said. "Sit." She sat. There was a stool, placed, she noticed, at the correct distance for a conversation between a director and a keeper: near enough to be heard, far enough to be told to go. "You have been having a difficult season," Cui Yuanheng said. "One of your jars was replaced. A man died across the wall. The censorate read your books. And now the nights are cold and the old keeper's eyes are failing and you are carrying the whole Hall on one pair of hands." He smiled, a small, dry, courteous smile. "I have read your record. You call a good hour. You have a true ear." "Thank you." "I am told you have been asking questions about the night of the ninth day of the tenth month." "Yes." "Tell me them." He lifted the cold tea and set it down again without drinking. "All of them. I would rather hear a keeper's questions than have a clerk's report of them." Shulan considered, for one breath, and decided that a man like this already knew the questions, and that hiding them would buy her nothing and cost her the chance to watch his face. "I asked who sealed the decree that night, and at what hour the register says it was sealed, and whether the clock that gave the hour was true." "And what did you conclude?" "That the clock was fast." "Was it." Cui Yuanheng folded his hands. "Do you know how many instruments in this city could tell us whether you are right?" "The shadow stick and the sun." "The shadow stick and the sun," he agreed. "And the water of the Dripping Stair, which is the finest instrument in the empire, and which the Bureau has certified four times a year for as long as any living man remembers, and which was certified again at the end of this last season, in my own office, by my own astronomer." He paused. "You see the difficulty. You are one keeper with a good ear. The clock is the clock. If the clock is wrong, then the sun is wrong, and the sky is wrong, and the Concordance is wrong, and every gate that opened this year opened at the wrong hour, and every rite was held on the wrong day, and the throne's calendar—" He stopped and looked at her with real, patient interest. "Do you know what happens to a throne whose calendar is wrong?" "No." "Nothing. Nothing at all, for a hundred years, and then one year, three provinces lose their harvest to a frost that came on a day the Concordance called auspicious, and the people say the emperor has lost the sky, and the man who says it is not a liar, he is a wind, and thrones fall to wind." He picked up the tea and drank it cold. "So the clock is true. Whatever you have heard it say, the clock is true, because the clock must be true. That is not a lie, Keeper Yan. That is the shape of the world you and I are both standing in." Shulan sat very still. "You have not asked me whether I moved it," she said. "I do not need to ask. You did not move it. If you had moved it, you would not have gone to the market to ask a seal-cutter whether a seal was cut from a rubbing, and you would not have asked the physician about the fingers of a dead man." Cui Yuanheng set the cup down. "I know everything you have done since the ninth day of the tenth month. That is not a threat. It is an offer. A woman who thinks clearly is wasted carrying water at two in the morning. I will have you transferred to the day office of the Bureau, where the records are kept. You will have a room, and a stove, and a rank, and the rank will feed your brother at Millet Gate, who is a clerk with a careless hand and a post that depends on the Bureau's goodwill, as every post in this city does." "And if I will not come?" "Then on the first day of the next month an inspector will find that the seventh jar of the Hall of Measured Hours has a widened spout and a shimmed arrow, that the only person with the authority to touch the seventh jar is its keeper, and that the keeper has been keeping notes in a hollow rule, and that the keeper left the palace in disguise twice in one month." He looked at her without malice, the way a man looks at a figure he has written down correctly. "You will not be tried, because a woman of the inner court is not tried. You will be sent out of the women's gate with your bowl and your coat and a note in your file, and your brother will lose his post, and the Hall will get a new keeper who counts to thirty and stops." The room was very quiet. Somewhere on the terrace above them a man was moving the armillary by its wheel, and she could hear the small, precise tick of the bronze. "I will think about your offer," Shulan said. "Do." Cui Yuanheng rose and bowed to her again, exactly as before. "And Keeper Yan. When you think, think of the seventh jar. That poor jar has had a hard year. It was cracked, you know. That is why it was replaced. Cracked at the belly in the ninth month and recast at my own order, because a crack in a water jar is a crack in the calendar, and I do not let the calendar crack." She was almost at the door when she saw it. On the lower shelf behind his chair, half in shadow, among the trays of broken instruments waiting to be mended, sat a bronze jar. It was old and dark and pitted, and it had a date cut into its base by the foundry chisel, worn shallow with years, and its lip had a spout, and the spout was as narrow as a reed stem. It had no crack in it at all. ---