第14章 The Second Night

Gao Peide had been taking the chrysanthemum decoction for eleven days. Ba Shouyi had prescribed it, and the Hall's standing order at the palace dispensary had drawn it, and it came up twice a week in a small glazed jar with a paper tied over the mouth, and Shulan had been heating a measure of it every evening and holding the cup while the old man drank. It was bitter with the bitterness of medicine, which is a bitterness people stop tasting. On the eighteenth day she noticed his fingers. She was tying the string around the paper on the fresh jar, and he put out his hand to steady the cup, and the small finger of his left hand had gone the color of a bruise all the way around the nail. Shulan did not move. The string was between her fingers and she went on tying it, because Meng Zhu was in the room, and because a keeper learns early that everything she does is watched by someone. That night, after the lights were down, she poured the decoction into a bowl and took it to the window and held it up against the last of the sky, and then she put one drop of it on her tongue. It was bitter. It was always bitter. But under the bitterness of chrysanthemum there was another bitterness, thin and cold and slow, like the taste of a nail left in water, and she had no name for it and did not need one. She poured the bowl out into the sink and rinsed it three times and left it on the bench, and then she sat down on the floor beside the bench in the dark and put her hands over her face. He had kept the jars for thirty years. He had taught her to count, and to distrust the arrow, and to keep her own book. He had told her on the day after Han Qidu died that she was the only person in the palace who could move the seventh jar without breaking a seal, and he had been right, and he had not said one word to anyone, and someone had decided that a blind old man was worth a slow spoonful a day. In the morning she took the new jar of decoction and the old jar, and she carried both of them out of the palace in Wen Momo's soap cart and left them with the old woman in the yard in Willow Canal Ward, and told her to keep them in the well house where the cold would hold them, and to tell no one. Then she went to Ba Shouyi. He was in the outer court's dispensary with his sleeves rolled and his hands in a basin, and he listened to her the way he listened to a patient, with his eyes down, and when she was finished he dried his hands very slowly. "You are asking me to test a jar of the palace's own medicine for a poison," he said. "Yes." "Do you know what my office would do to a physician of the outer court who wrote that the palace dispensary is putting the wolf's root into a keeper's stomach?" "I know you signed a finding once," Shulan said. "You told me why." Ba Shouyi looked at the wall for a long moment. Then he took the jar and uncorked it and smelled it, and dipped a splinter of wood in it and touched the splinter to his tongue, and made a face that was not a man's face but a physician's, all attention and no feeling. "There is something in this that is not chrysanthemum," he said. "I will not write it. I will tell you what to do with it, and that is all. Stop giving it to him. Give him boiled water and rice and let him eat no medicine at all for a month. If he has been taking it eleven days at this strength, he has perhaps twenty days in him and he will sleep a great deal and he will be very slow, and if you stop it now he may keep his heart." "And if I report it?" "If you report it, the jar goes into the palace's hands, and the palace finds chrysanthemum in it, because by the time anyone draws a paper on it, it will have chrysanthemum in it." He put the jar down. "Keeper Yan. They are closing the circle. They have taken the page from your book, and they have relieved you of the night, and now they are reaching for the old man, who hears everything. What they are doing is not killing a keeper. They are springing a trap. A person who is very frightened does something that can be seen, and then the thing that can be seen is the crime they are charged with." --- She went back into the Hall that afternoon and looked at the seventh jar, and her heart went cold in her chest. The spout was narrower. She saw it at once, because she had looked at that spout every day for two months, and the mouth of it, which had taken her little finger to the second joint, now took it only to the first. Someone had been at it with a punch or a rounded chisel, working the bronze inward, a little at a time. She turned and looked at the frame and the bowl and the tally board and the shelf, and everything in the Hall was where it had been, and the arrow was where it had been, and nothing in the room had changed except the one thing that mattered. That night she sat up in the back room with her ear to the boards and listened, and at the second mark of the second watch she heard the inner door of the Hall open, very softly, and footsteps come in, and a pause, and then the small, dull, patient sound of metal being pressed against metal, five or six times, and then silence, and then the footsteps going out. She did not move. She lay in the dark with her hand over her mouth, because if she went out there she would see a face, and the face would see her, and there was nothing in the world she could say to it. In the morning the spout was narrower again, and the drift in the relay's letters and the drift in her scraps had both stopped being the drift of a clock that ran fast. They were the drift of a clock that was being brought back to the truth, an hour at a time, in the dark, by hands that had six nights left before the solstice. Shulan stood in front of the seventh jar and did the sum in her head. At the rate the spout was being narrowed, the clock would be within a breath of true by the morning of the solstice, and the certification would find nothing, and the arrow would read exactly what the sun read, and every paper in the empire would be clean. And then she thought: they are narrowing the wrong end. Whoever was doing this had been told that the seventh jar was fast, and had gone to the seventh jar, and was working at the spout that fed the receiving bowl, and had not looked at the board that carried the arrow. The shim was still there. She had felt it with her fingertip that morning, the little sliver of pine, sitting in the wax where it had sat since the autumn, lifting the arrow a hair's height off its float. They had fixed the water and forgotten the arrow. It was not much. A hair's height was not a mark, and a hair's height was not proof, and a hair's height would not move a magistrate. But a hair's height was a thing she could show, and a thing she could show, in the right room, in the right morning, to the right man, was a door. She sat down by the bowl and took out her scrap of paper and wrote, in her smallest hand, the hour the water said, and beside it the hour the arrow said, and the two numbers sat on the page like two men standing on opposite banks of a river. ---