第18章 The Hour of the Sun

They came in at the grey hour with frost on their shoulders. The deputy's order had done its work. Two astronomers of the Bureau of Sky-Reckoning came up the steps with their carrying cases, Pei Zhongyan and a thin, silent young man named Gan who said nothing and looked at everything. A recorder of the censorate came behind them with a box of papers, a man Shulan had not seen before, old and dry and wearing the censorate's grey. And last, unhurried, heron-grey, with a servant holding a lacquer case, came Cui Yuanheng. He stopped on the threshold when he saw the room. He saw the two astronomers. He saw the recorder. He saw the censorate's secretary Luo Cheng standing at the table with his book open. He saw the warden on his stool and the blind old keeper on the bench. And he saw the instrument-smith sitting on the floor against the shelf with his hands under his knees and a punch and a small hammer lying on the table not three feet from the receiving bowl. His face did not change. That was the thing about him that Shulan would remember all her life. He stood in the doorway of the Hall of Measured Hours in the last of the dark and looked at the seven jars and the shimmed arrow and the tools of a mending man laid out like a meal, and his face did not change at all, and he bowed to the recorder and to the astronomers as if he had walked into an ordinary morning. "Shall we begin?" he said. --- The rule of the winter certification was four hundred years old, and it was simple, because it had been written by men who did not trust each other. The keeper of the clock fills the jars before dark. The instrument runs the night. At sunrise, the shadow stick on the terrace and the arrow in the bowl are read at the same moment, and the difference between them is entered in the register of instruments, and both astronomers sign, and the keeper signs, and the register goes to the censorate, which is why the register is a public paper, which is why a man will lie about a clock but will not delete a line from a register that four hundred years of officers have signed. They set the shadow stick on the terrace. The sky over the western wall went from iron to pearl. Shulan stood by the receiving bowl with her hands at her sides and her heart going like a drum, and the cold came in through the high window and lay on the water in the jars. The sun rose. It came up over the wall in a line of red and struck the shadow stick, and the stick's shadow ran out along the stone, and Pei Zhongyan knelt at the stone with his rule and read it, and the young astronomer Gan read it over his shoulder, and both of them said the same number, which is what two men reading the same fact will do. And at the same moment Shulan read the arrow in the receiving bowl. The rule of ivory had twenty-four marks on it. The arrow stood between the marks that were the hour of sunrise, and the marks the arrow claimed were a mark and a half ahead of the sun. Pei Zhongyan rose from the stone. "Keeper," he said. "The arrow." "A mark and a half fast," Shulan said. "Or a mark and a half short, if you read it the other way. The clock says the sun rose a mark and a half ago. The sun says it did not." The Hall was absolutely quiet. The young astronomer Gan wrote the two numbers in his own hand, and then, being a careful man, he went to the stone and read it a second time, and wrote that down too. "The difference is a mark and a half," Pei Zhongyan said, to the recorder, in a voice loud enough to be the voice of the register. "I certify it. On the morning of the solstice, by the founding rule, in the presence of the keeper of the instrument and of the censorate, the arrow of the Hall of Measured Hours is a mark and a half ahead of the shadow. The clock is false." "Read the water," Shulan said. Pei Zhongyan looked at her. "Read the drip," she said. "Not the arrow. The seventh jar. Count it." He came to the seventh jar and knelt, and she gave him the little bronze measure out of her sleeve, and he held it under the spout, and he counted, and the mouth of the spout gave up its full measure in two hundred and seventy counts, which was between the two hundred and thirty of the autumn and the two hundred and ninety of the spring, because four nights of work with a punch and a hammer had brought it halfway home. Pei Zhongyan sat back on his heels. "This jar has been moved," he said. "This jar has been moved, and moved back." --- Cui Yuanheng had not moved from the doorway. "Astronomer Pei," he said. "You are certifying that the instrument of the Hall is false. The instrument of the Hall is the Bureau's instrument, and this season's certification of it bears your own signature, and the signature before that bears your own signature, four times over, two years of them. If the clock is false, then you have signed four false papers. If you have signed four false papers, then the fault is not in the jar. The fault is in the man who read it." "I read the shadow," Pei Zhongyan said. "You read the arrow four times and called it true." "Exactly," said Pei Zhongyan. "That is what I have come to say in front of the register. I read the arrow four times and called it true, because I was a clerk who looked at a servant and signed what the servant showed me, and the servant showed me the arrow, and the arrow is not the clock." He stood up. "I will sign the register this morning with the true numbers and my own failure written under them, in my own hand, and I will ask the censorate to write it down, because a man who has signed four false papers should not be permitted to explain himself in private." Cui Yuanheng looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at the smith on the floor, and at the punch and the hammer on the table, and at Luo Cheng's open book, and at Huang Zhen with his keys, and last at Shulan. "Keeper Yan," he said. "You have made a great deal of noise about a jar." "Yes," Shulan said. "A jar is a jar. It cracks and it is recast. If a mending man from my lower court came into this Hall without my knowledge at night to work on a jar he was not asked to work on, then that is a matter for my office, and my office will deal with it." He said it quietly, with the calm of a man who had dealt with a great many matters in his office. "But the register will have the numbers you want, and the numbers will be true, and the Bureau will have to live with them, and so will you. Do you understand what you have done this morning? You have put it in the register that the sky this year was kept wrong. Not by a jar. By an office. The register of instruments is read by the throne. The throne will want to know who did it, and the answer they will be given is a mending man, and a clerk, and a blind old keeper, and a woman who counts things." He bowed to the recorder, and to the two astronomers, and went out into the cold. Luo Cheng wrote for a while. Then he looked up. "He did not ask about the seal," he said. "The seal on the corrections. He did not ask about it once, all morning, and it is the one thing a man who had nothing to do with it would have asked about first." "No," Shulan said. "He did not." Outside, the sun had cleared the wall and lay flat across the court, and somewhere beyond the west gate of the palace a bell was ringing for the opening of the gates, and the whole city was waking up on the day the Concordance had called the shortest day of the year, and it was, and the clock had said it was not. ---