第19章 What the Director Said

The case was not opened against the director of the Bureau of Sky-Reckoning. It was opened against Pu the instrument-smith, for an unlawful alteration of an instrument of the state; and against Bu Ying, clerk of the chancery register, first class, for the writing of unlawful corrections to the Great Concordance and for the sealing of a decree at an hour when the man whose office the seal belonged to was three hours dead. The register of instruments was corrected in the first week, and the false certification of the season was struck through and re-written, and the almanac's three pasted sheets were ordered recalled from every relay on the eastern road. The decree that had gone out under the register's seal was voided, and the commission of the southern granaries went to a different man, and a quiet note went into the file of a household in the north of the city whose name Shulan never learned. And on the ninth day after the solstice, Shulan was sent for by Cui Yuanheng. He received her in the same room, in the same chair, with the armillary turning on the terrace above and the Concordance on the wall open at the month. He was alone. His table was bare except for one book, closed, and a cup of tea that had gone cold, and on the shelf behind him the trays of broken instruments had been cleared away, and the shelf was empty, and the old seventh jar was gone. "I have been asked to retire," he said. "By a man whose name I will not give you, because he gave it to me in confidence, and because it would not help you to have it. I will go to my brother's estate in the hills and I will draw the shadows there for what remains of my life, and the Bureau will say that I am unwell, and the register will say nothing, because the register only records instruments." He lifted the cold tea and set it down. "I asked for you because I have one question, and it is the only question I have ever wanted to ask a keeper. How did you know? Not how you proved it. How did you know, on the second day, before the jar, before the seal, before the physician? What told you?" "The drip," Shulan said. "The seventh jar answered too quickly when I filled it. There was nothing else. The arrow was where it should be. The rule was where it should be. The jar sounded wrong, and I had heard it sound right for eight years." Cui Yuanheng nodded slowly. "I have read the sky for forty years," he said. "I have never once heard a jar. That is the whole of my failure and the whole of yours. You listened to a thing that had no rank, and I read the papers that had rank, and the papers had been signed by me." Shulan stood with her hands folded and said nothing, because there was nothing she wanted to ask him that a room could hold. But he answered her anyway, as if he had heard the question she had not asked. "You want to know why," he said. "It is a small why, and I am not ashamed of it, and I will tell you the true one and not the pretty one. The Bureau is four hundred years old. It has told this empire when to plant and when to marry and when to hold the offering for four hundred years, and for four hundred years the empire has believed it, and belief is a thing that runs out, Keeper Yan, like water. Two years ago there was a frost in the south and the Concordance had called the day fair, and there were men in three provinces who said the emperor had lost the sky. Not enemies. Farmers. And a household in the north of this city came to me, quietly, the way such a household comes, and asked me for one night. One night in the tenth month, a night when the register would seal a decree, so that a countersignature would stand, and a clerk would be touched on the shoulder in the dark, and the matter would end, and nothing would come of it. And I looked at the four hundred years, and I looked at the frost in the south, and I said yes." He turned the cup on the table. "That is the whole of it. I did not do it for coin. I did it because the sky was already in the hand of one household, and I decided that the Bureau was worth one night of it, and the night was worth one man's life, and the man's name was Han Qidu, and I did not know he had a mother, and now I do, because she wrote to the censorate." Shulan left him there with the cold tea and the empty shelf. --- Gao Peide lived. He lived slowly, and he slept most of the day, and for a month he could not stand, and Ba Shouyi came twice a week with boiled water and rice and said nothing about it to anyone. By the spring, the old man could walk to the sun-court on his own, with his blind face turned up, and sit on the bench in the warmth with his hands in his sleeves. "The clock is true now," Shulan told him, the first day he came back to the Hall. "I heard." "Pei Zhongyan is acting director of the Bureau. He signed the register himself with his own failure under the true numbers. He has ordered that the certification be made every month instead of four times a year, and that the keeper's measure be entered in the register beside the arrow." "Then he is a better man than the last one," Gao Peide said. "Which is not difficult." He was quiet for a while, feeling the sun. "And your brother?" "He has a post at the relay by the eastern gate. It is not Millet Gate, but it is closer than the western road, and the roof does not leak. Luo Cheng wrote him a letter. He owed him one." "And the woman who keeps the clock has what she had before." "She has the clock," Shulan said. "Then she has more than she had before," said Gao Peide, and he smiled at nothing, with his milky eyes turned toward the window, "because before, she only thought she had it." ---