第9章 The Physician's Word

A man can die of a broken heart in a palace, and the palace will believe it, because the palace has never had a heart and cannot imagine the trouble they cause. That was what the record said of Han Qidu. Sudden weakness of the heart, in his office, at the third watch, no wound, no fever, no blood, and the body released to his family on the second day. The finding had been written by the physician of the outer court, an old man named Lu, whose hand was very steady and whose practice was very old, and the censorate had received a copy of the finding and had put it in a box. Shulan had never met a physician. She had met the women who kept the sickrooms, and she had met the apothecary's boy who came through the inner court twice a month with the court's medicines in a wicker case, and she had once seen a man's leg sawed off after a fall from the wall, but that was in the outer yard and she had only seen the blood on the ground in the morning. She contrived to meet Ba Shouyi by the simple method of having Gao Peide's eyes get worse. It was not hard. Gao Peide's eyes had been getting worse for years, and she told the Hall steward that the old keeper could no longer see the arrow and could not be trusted alone on the night watch, and that the Hall asked for a physician. The steward, who was a lazy man and had no wish to stand a watch himself, signed the request at once, and two days later Ba Shouyi came into the Hall with a wicker case and a boy carrying a lantern in daylight. He was a neat, tired middle-aged man with careful hands and a way of looking at the room before he looked at the patient, which Shulan recognized at once, because it was the way she looked at a clock. He examined Gao Peide's eyes, put drops in them, asked questions in a low voice, and when he was done he sat back and said that there was nothing to be done, that the old man had cataracts coming on both eyes, and that he should keep the day hours and take a decoction of chrysanthemum and be content. Then he packed his case, and Shulan said, in a voice pitched low, "Physician. Did you see the body of Secretary Han Qidu?" Ba Shouyi's hands stopped on the clasp of his case. "That was Physician Lu's finding," he said. "I know whose finding it was. I am asking whether you saw the body." "Why are you asking?" "Because I called the third watch that night," Shulan said, "and I would like to know the hour a man died before I am asked about it in a room with closed doors." The physician looked at her for a while. The boy with the lantern stood at the doorway, bored, looking at the jars. "I was called to the chancery court in the morning to certify the body for the family," Ba Shouyi said. "Physician Lu was ill that week. I had known Han Qidu slightly, in the way one knows a man whose office is on the way to one's own. He was lying against the shelf with his brush across his knees." "And?" "And there is no wound on a man who dies of his heart, and there was no wound on him." Ba Shouyi looked down at his hands. "But there was a thing on his lips. A fine white froth, dry, already dried when I saw him, and under it a stain the color of tea. And the tips of his fingers were dark, darker than the cold would make them, and one of them, the smallest finger of his left hand, had gone the color of a bruise all the way around the nail." Shulan said nothing. She had no words for the way the room had gone quiet. "A heart does not darken a man's fingers," Ba Shouyi said. "A slow root does. The root the mountain people call the purple monkshood. It is kept in the palace dispensary for the killing of rats, and it is bitter, and it must be given a little at a time over many days, in a tea or a tonic, before it does what it does. A man takes it for a month and feels nothing but a heaviness. Then one night his heart slows and stops and he leans against a shelf and the brush is still in his hand." "Then how does a finding say heart?" Ba Shouyi closed the clasp of his case with a click. "Because I am the second physician of the outer court," he said, "and Physician Lu is the first, and Physician Lu's finding was already written when I was called, and I was asked to sign as a second witness, and I signed. I am a physician, Keeper Yan. I am not a magistrate. My office is to tell the family what they may bear. If I write that a secretary of the chancery was given the wolf's root for a month by some person unknown, the family cannot bear it, the censorate will not receive it from me, and I will be sent to a town on the frontier where the horses are better treated than the doctors. That is the whole of my position and I will not lose it for a finding that another man has already signed." He picked up his case and stood, and then, at the door, he paused and said, without turning around: "The tonic he drank in the evenings came from a dispensary in the Western Market, at the sign of the two fishes, and I have seen the same tonic in three other offices of the chancery court." He put his hat on. "Good day." --- Shulan stood in the Hall after he had gone. Gao Peide, who had been lying on the bench with his eyes shut the whole time, opened them and looked at the ceiling with his milky, useless gaze. "You heard," she said. "I hear everything," he said. "It is the one thing that does not need eyes." He sat up slowly and felt for the edge of the bench. "The two fishes. I know that shop. When I was young, before the Hall, I carried water for the Bureau and I went there to buy a salve for my hands. The shop belongs to a man whose brother is a clerk in the Bureau's own office, a clerk who writes the small hands, the corrections and the notes. It is a very honest shop. It sells the whole court its tonics." He stopped, and his blind face turned toward her, and she saw that he had understood the whole shape of it at the same time she had. "Shulan," he said. "If the poison came through the dispensary, then the dispensary is only the hand. Someone ordered it drawn, and gave it a name to put in the book, and paid for it, and who pays for a tonic is written in the book too." "Then I will find the book," she said. "The book is in the Western Market, in a shop with two fishes on the door, and you are a keeper of the inner court, and you cannot walk in their door twice." Gao Peide lay back down. "Find someone who can." ---