第12章 The Petition

There was a way to say a thing to the throne, and it was not the way Shulan had. The way was a petition. A petition was written on ruled paper in a fixed form, and it began with the petitioner's name and office and the office of the person it was addressed to, and it was not carried to a gate by the petitioner. It was carried by the petitioner's master of record, which is to say the household or bureau to which the petitioner belonged, and it went up through the clerk of that bureau, and the clerk of the palace steward, and so to the censorate, which read petitions in the order in which they were received, and answered them in the order in which they were stamped. A keeper of the inner court had a master of record. Her master of record was the Hall, and the Hall's master was the palace steward, and the palace steward was a lazy man who had signed whatever was put in front of him for nineteen years. So Shulan wrote the petition in her own hand, on ruled paper bought from the Hall steward's ink cupboard, and she set down in it: the seventh jar, the widened spout, the shim under the arrow, the recast date, the drift in the relay's hours, the cut page, the seal cut from a rubbing, the dark fingers of a dead man, the night tally issued to a clerk named Bu Ying, and the cold tea of the director of the Bureau of Sky-Reckoning. It was nine pages long. Meng Zhu read it with her finger moving under the characters, and when she got to the end she was silent. "You have written it plainly," she said. "It is very good." "It will not be read." "Then why write it?" "Because a thing that is written is a thing that exists," Shulan said. "A thing that is said into a room stops existing when the room empties. If I am taken out of the women's gate and my file is stamped and my name is written on a list of the troublesome, I want the paper to be somewhere that is not me." She gave the petition to the Hall's clerk to enter in the outgoing book. The Hall's clerk was a small, frightened, exact man who had been in the office for twenty years and whose whole art was to write what he was given and no more. He entered the petition in the book, wrote the date, and stamped it, and three days later Shulan was told that the petition had been returned. It came back with a note in the steward's hand, and the note was one sentence, and the sentence was: *Matters of the clock and the Concordance are matters for the Bureau of Sky-Reckoning, and this office does not forward papers upon them.* She sat with the nine pages in her lap. "Then we send it to the Bureau," Meng Zhu said. "The Bureau wrote the paper I am trying to disprove." "Then we send it to the censorate." "A petition must be forwarded by the master of record." "Then we—" Meng Zhu stopped. "Then we do it another way," Shulan said. --- The another way was Luo Cheng. He was a secretary of the censorate, not a censor, and a secretary of the censorate was worth exactly what his brush was worth, which was more than a keeper and less than a gate. He had come to the Hall on the second day and had asked her one question and had written down her answer, and she had lied to him, and he had written down the lie. She had thought about that lie for a month. A man who writes down a lie knows he has been handed one. He had looked at her for one long moment and had gone away without pressing, which was either laziness or patience, and she had decided, in the end, that it was patience, because a lazy man does not carry a wooden box of statements into the inner court on the second day after a death. She got word to him through Wen Momo's nephew, who worked in the horse yard of the censorate and could be trusted to carry a folded paper for the price of a bowl of noodles. She wrote on the outside: *For Secretary Luo, from the keeper of the third watch.* He came to the north gate of the palace on the sixteenth day, at the hour when the soap cart was at the gate, and he stood outside the gate in the cold with his hands in his sleeves and did not look at the cart at all, which was the correct behavior, and Shulan walked past him twice, and the second time she put the nine pages into the fold of his sleeve without stopping. He was gone when she looked back. --- Three things happened in the ten days that followed. The first: on the eighteenth day, her brother's name appeared in the relay inspector's list, and on the nineteenth a letter came to Xiaode from the Bureau of Sky-Reckoning's office of records, informing him that his employment at Millet Gate Relay was concluded, that his bookkeeping had been found careless, and that he might apply for a position at a relay on the western road if he wished to remain in the service. The western road relays were two hundred li from the capital and the nearest one had a leaking roof and a horse that could not be ridden. The second: on the twenty-second day, Warden Huang Zhen came to the Hall and told Shulan, in his mild, even voice, that the steward had decided that the keeper of the Hall should take the day hours from the first of the next month, and that the night hours would be taken by the junior keeper, Meng Zhu, under the supervision of the warden himself, since the night hours required a clear eye and the keeper had been troubled by the cold. It was not a punishment. It was worse. It was a paper. The third: on the twenty-fourth day, Luo Cheng sent back two words through Wen Momo's nephew. The two words were *Bring bronze.* Shulan did not sleep that night. She lay on her pallet in the Hall's back room with the drip coming through the wall the way a heartbeat comes through a mother's body, and she thought about the word bronze, which could mean the jar, and the shim, and the rule, and the arrow, and which almost certainly meant the old seventh jar, the one with the reed's mouth and no crack in it, sitting on a shelf in the room of the director of the Bureau of Sky-Reckoning, four hundred paces from where she lay. You cannot steal a jar out of a director's room. You cannot steal a jar out of a director's room, and you cannot carry it out of the west gate, and you cannot show it to a magistrate, because a jar taken out of a director's room is a jar that was stolen, and a stolen thing is not evidence, it is theft. But there was one day in the year when the Bureau came to the Hall with its own instruments and its own astronomers and set them beside the Dripping Stair, and that day was the certification at the winter solstice, and it was eleven days away, and by the rules of the Bureau it required two astronomers to attend, and by the rules of the Hall it required the keeper of the clock to be present to fill the jars and to read the arrow. She would be relieved of the night hours on the first of the month. She would still be the keeper of the clock. And on the morning of the solstice, in front of two astronomers and the warden and whoever else chose to stand in the cold, the sun would come up, and the arrow would read a mark and a half before it, and no paper in the empire could make the sun wait. ---