第3章 The Arrow and the Rule

On the third day after Han Qidu died, Shulan took the seventh jar off the frame. It was not a thing a keeper did lightly. The jar weighed as much as a small child and held a smell of old stone, and the frame was built to hold it and not to give it up. She waited until the Hall was empty, until Meng Zhu had gone to the kitchens for the noon rice and Gao Peide had been led to the sun-court by a laundry girl who liked him. Then she climbed onto the stool, worked her hands under the jar's belly, and lifted it down. Meng Zhu found her with it on the floor. Meng Zhu was seventeen and had come to the Hall in the summer, and she was quick and loud and could not keep anything in her hands for longer than a breath without turning it over. She stood in the doorway with two bowls of rice and looked at Shulan sitting on the floor with the jar in her lap. "Has it cracked?" "No." "Then why is it in your lap?" Shulan considered lying and decided against it. Meng Zhu had hands like a pickpocket and eyes like a market inspector, and she would find out anyway. "Because it is lying to me," Shulan said. Meng Zhu set the rice down and came and knelt beside her. Together they turned the jar in the light. The bronze was old and dark and pitted in the places where the water had stood longest, and around the mouth of the little spout at the lip there was a ring of bright, raw metal, no wider than the nail of a thumb. Someone had been at the spout with a file. Shulan held the jar up until the window light crossed the lip, and then she saw it clearly. The spout had been cut into the lip long ago, in the founding of the Hall, and the bronze around it had gone smooth and round with years of water. But the inner edge of the opening had been worked, recently and roughly, with a thin file, and the file had caught the metal in short strokes that had left fine parallel scratches. The opening was wider than the others. She could see it by eye alone. She could feel it with the tip of her little finger, which went further into the seventh jar's spout than into any of its six brothers. "Who files a jar?" Meng Zhu asked. "Someone who wants it to run faster." Meng Zhu was quiet. Then she said, "If it runs faster, the arrow climbs faster. The arrow climbing faster means the hours come early." "Means the hours come early," Shulan agreed. "Since when?" Shulan set the jar down and got the measure out of her sleeve and made Meng Zhu count with her, twice, and then a third time, and all three times the seventh jar gave up its full measure faster than it had in the spring, and all three times Meng Zhu's count matched hers. "Two hundred and thirty," Meng Zhu said. "Spring was two hundred and ninety?" "So I remember." "You remember everything." "I remember the water," Shulan said. "It is the one thing in this palace that does not want anything." She turned the jar over and looked at the base. There, where the bronze met the wood, was the foundry's mark: a small square stamp with a character cut in it, and beside the stamp, scratched with a chisel in the foundry's own rough hand, a date. The tenth day of the ninth month. "The jar was recast in the autumn," she said. "Jars crack." "They do. But this one did not come back the same jar." She put her finger in the spout again. "The old jar had a reed's mouth. This one has a mouth the width of a finger joint. Someone filed it, and someone else wrote a delivery note, and the note had to say the jar came from the Bureau's foundry, because nothing enters the inner rooms without a Bureau stamp." Meng Zhu looked at her with a face that was trying very hard to be a keeper's face and kept slipping into a girl's. "Shulan. If you tell them this, what happens?" "They ask me how I know." "You say the water runs fast." "The Bureau certified the clock at the season's end," Shulan said. "Two astronomers came and looked at it and signed a paper and went away. Their paper says the clock is true. If I say it is false, I am saying the Bureau signed a lie. The Bureau does not sign lies. The Bureau is where lies go to be turned into truths." "I do not understand that." "Neither do I," Shulan said, which was not true, because she did understand it, and she would have explained it if explaining had helped. She put the jar back on the frame. Then she did the thing she had been putting off since the morning. She looked at the receiving bowl. The bowl was wide and shallow and made of the same dull bronze, and in it floated the wooden board that carried the arrow, and the float sat in the water on a bed of wax. She lifted the board out and turned it over, and there, wedged between the board and the base of the arrow, was a shim: a sliver of old pine, cut thin, pushed in so that the arrow sat a hair's height higher on its float than it should have. A hair's height. On a rule of twenty-four marks, a hair's height was nothing at all. Over a night, it was a breath. Over a month, it was a watch. "Two lies," Shulan said softly. Meng Zhu leaned in. "Two?" "One in the water and one in the arrow. Whoever did it did not trust one alone." Shulan turned the shim between her fingers. The pine had been cut with a knife and not a saw, and the cut was clean and deliberate, and the wood was the same pale color as the pressed cakes of incense that the inner court burned in summer. She wrapped the shim in a corner of her sleeve cloth, and put the jar back, and filled the jars as the light failed, and called the first watch of the night at the arrow's first mark, and wrote the number on the Hall's tally board for the world. Then she wrote the true number on her scrap and tucked it into the hollow of the ivory rule. That night she dreamed of filing a spout. She held a thin file in her hand and worked at the bronze, and the shavings came off bright and fine like the skin of a fruit, and when she woke she found that she had been scraping her own thumbnail in her sleep, over and over, wearing it down. She kept the shim in her robe for three days, close to her body, until the edges of it had gone soft with the warmth of her. It was the only true thing she owned. It was worth less than a bowl of rice. At the end of the third day, she went to Gao Peide and knelt by his stool and put it in his hand. He turned it over twice, felt the cut edges, held it to his blind eyes as though the moon might read it for him. "Pine," he said. "From the incense shed. They plane those cakes on a bench and the shavings go into the braziers by the gate, and anyone who walks past can take one." He gave it back. "Keep it, and keep it better than you have kept it. Anyone in the palace could have made this. That is what makes it dangerous. It does not point at one man. It points at us." ---