第16章 A Woman's Testimony

The hearing was held in a side room of the censorate on the twenty-ninth day, in the afternoon, and it was not a trial and did not pretend to be. There were four men in the room. The deputy censor, a heavy, slow, careful officer named Duan Zhiqing, sat behind the only table. Luo Cheng sat at the end of it with his box of statements. Cui Yuanheng sat to the deputy's right in a chair that had been brought in for him, which told Shulan everything about the room before anyone spoke. And Bu Ying stood by the door, in the plain coat of a first-class clerk, with his hands folded, and his face composed, and his eyes going from speaker to speaker like a man at a game he had watched many times. Shulan sat on a stool in the middle of the floor. "The censorate has received certain papers," Duan Zhiqing said, "and has asked the keeper of the Hall of Measured Hours to answer questions upon them. This is an inquiry, not a charge. Keeper Yan, state your office." "Keeper of the clock of the Hall of Measured Hours, in service eight years." "State what you believe you have found." She had thought about this for three nights. She had decided that the truth would be told in the order in which a clock tells it: the water, then the arrow, then the hour. She told them about the seventh jar, and the drift, and the recast date. She told them about the shim under the arrow. She told them about the relay at Millet Gate and the sixty-one letters, and about the old man west of the market and his shadows, and about the cut page in the Hall's book, and about the physician's dark fingers, and about the night tally issued to a first-class clerk named Bu Ying at the third watch on the ninth day of the tenth month, and about the corrections on the shed wall in the Western Market, and about a seal with an old flaw and a new barb in it. When she was done, the room was quiet. "Keeper Yan," Duan Zhiqing said. "Do you understand that you have accused the Bureau of Sky-Reckoning of certifying a false instrument, and a clerk of the chancery register of being present at the death of his secretary?" "I have said what the water said." "The water said nothing. The water fell from a jar." The deputy looked down at the papers on the table. "Now. Director Cui has asked leave to put a question to you, and I will permit it." Cui Yuanheng turned his head and looked at her with the same courteous, patient attention he had given her in his room. "Keeper Yan. Who has the authority to touch the seventh jar of the Hall of Measured Hours?" "I do." "Not the warden, not the steward, not the Bureau. You." "I fill it and I clean it. The jar itself is the Bureau's instrument." "The jar itself is the Bureau's instrument and the keeper is its hand," Cui Yuanheng said gently. "So tell the deputy: in the whole palace, in the whole city, in the whole empire, who has the opportunity to widen the mouth of the seventh jar, to put a shim beneath the arrow, and to write down the hours in a private book against the hours in the palace's book?" Shulan said nothing. "Only you," said Cui Yuanheng. "Only the keeper of the clock can do all three, and you have done all three. You have widened it, or you have narrowed it, whichever fits the morning's argument. You have lifted the arrow and slipped a sliver under it. You have kept notes in the hollow of a rule where no one was to look. And you left this palace in a laundry coat, twice, in a month, and you cannot be found on any errand list." He sat back. "I do not say you did a crime. I say that if the thing you describe had been done, you are the only person in the world who could have done it, and that is a fact the deputy may weigh." "I was given the clock to keep," Shulan said. "The clock is not mine." "That will do for a proverb," Cui Yuanheng said. "It will not do for a defence." Duan Zhiqing raised a hand. "Enough. Keeper Yan, one more question from the censorate. You have said that the corrections on the market wall were written in a hand that is the hand of a chancery clerk. Do you stand on that?" "I stand on the hand," she said. The deputy turned. "Clerk Bu. Come forward and write." Bu Ying came to the table, and Luo Cheng gave him paper and a brush already wet, and the deputy said, "Write your name, and your office, and the date." Bu Ying wrote. Shulan watched the brush. So did Luo Cheng, leaning in, and so did Duan Zhiqing, who moved the paper toward the window as soon as it was done, and held it up beside the correction page that Luo Cheng had put in the file, and looked at the two of them for a long time. Everybody in the room watched the deputy compare them, and everybody in the room understood what he was seeing, because the hand on the paper in his left hand leaned, and its tails came out thin and hooked, like the feet of a bird, and the hand on the paper in his right hand did the same, stroke for stroke, character for character, like a man signing under a mirror. "These are one hand," Duan Zhiqing said. "They are one hand, sir," Bu Ying said, without any change in his voice at all. "I was ordered to write the corrections. I received them from the register's office and I wrote them out fair, as any clerk writes whatever is put in front of him. If the order was unlawful, that is for the deputy to judge, and not for a second-class clerk to refuse." "And who gave you the order?" Bu Ying was silent for the first time. "The register's office," he said at last. "The office is above me. I do not know the man's name, and if I did, I would not stand in this room and put it in the deputy's hand, because a clerk who names his master ends his life in a ditch on the western road." Nobody said anything. Cui Yuanheng sat with his hands folded and looked at the window as if the light on the glass interested him. Duan Zhiqing put the two papers down. "This inquiry will make no finding," he said. "A finding requires a charge and a charge requires rank. But the censorate has before it an allegation touching the register of instruments of the Bureau of Sky-Reckoning, which is a public paper, and I will make one order and one only. At the winter certification of the state clocks, on the morning of the solstice, the Bureau will present two astronomers as the founding rule requires, and the censorate will send a recorder, and the officer in charge of the instrument will fill the jars and read the arrow, as the rule requires, in the presence of all of them." He looked at Shulan. "You are the officer in charge of the instrument. You will be there." "I will be there," Shulan said. ---