CHAPTER 1

 

CHAPTER 1 THE BREAKING OF THE BRUSH

The Scribe Weeps Over a Sea of Dead Letters;

The Scholar Flings the Ink to Greet the Sword.

 

Luoyang, the Eastern Han capital.

The third month of the sixteenth year of Yongping. (73 CE.)

The ink had skinned over again.

Ban Chao pushed the skin under with the pestle and ground until the well went even and black. Dipped. The tip came up dry anyway. It did that in the cold months, drank the first load and gave back nothing, and you dipped a second time and cursed the maker under your breath, a man in Chang'an most likely dead by now. Overhead the lattice let the river-draft through. The Luo River was low and you could smell that it was low. A mouse was down in the paste bins again. He had said so. Twice. The second time the under-clerk wrote the complaint onto a slip and put the slip in a box, and there the matter rested, as all matters rested.

Yong. Everlasting. Top half of the reign-name, Yongping. He had made the character so many times that his wrist laid the six strokes down on its own while the rest of him went off and looked at the wall. His right thumb was grey into the second knuckle and would not wash out. Meijun had given up on it. Married a man with one blue hand who's decided not to mention it, she said, so what's she to do, mention it herself.

Feng had the mat on his left. Dunhuang grain. Feng had copied Dunhuang grain since before half the boys in the hall were whelped, and the story went he'd started under old Guangwu and forgotten to stop, or to die, take whichever. Spine bent like a strung bow. He kept a dried date parked in one cheek because the teeth on that side were long gone, so his talk came out slantwise, off the good side.

"Dragging," Feng said. Did not look up. "There. That one. You dragged it."

"Silk's damp."

"Silk's damp every third month I've drawn breath, doesn't stop my hand." He turned a splint over, held it to the grey window, put it down. "Lighter. You blot the salt line, Inspector docks the whole row three bags. My boy's on elm bark. You go tell a child of six why there's bark in the pot. Go on. I'll watch."

Ban Chao looked at his scroll.

Three hundred bolts of hempen cloth from Nanyang. Forty-two piculs of dried ginger. Iron nails, two carts, rusted but serviceable.

Ten thousand cages this neat and he had built the lot. As a boy he'd copied his father Biao's histories for his rice. In his thirties he'd cleaned his brother Gu's drafts. Gu, who sat one floor up this very hour, laying the Book of Han down in vermilion for a thousand years to read. Even little Zhao sent her errata down for him to fair-copy, and Zhao's mind was worth the two of theirs stacked and a stone on top. They wrote the memory of the age. He tallied its nails.

Forty-one years old. His mother told the neighbours her second boy held a steady post at the Orchid Terrace. True. And the whole of it.

Two summers gone, a clerk called Wei had died at the mat by the east wall. Middle of the day. Nobody marked it until the lamps were lit and someone found his column left unfinished. They carried him out and the column got finished by another hand. His. Ban Chao's. And the thing he remembered, the thing that stayed, was that Wei's brushwork had been cleaner than his own, and now nobody would ever have that off the man again.

He wrote down another bushel of ginger. The archive cat put its cold nose to his ankle, found him no use, and went off to Feng, who kept crusts for it in his sleeve and denied it.

A sound came up through the floor before the window had it. A thud in the soles of the feet, in the stone. Not a cart. Carts roll and go on rolling. This came down hard and quit.

Hooves. One horse. Ridden to foundering, off the western road.

His brush hung over the word for ginger. A drop swelled at the tip.

"Don't," Feng said. "Don't you drop that. The millet."

He'd already turned to the lattice. The horse below did not smell of palace stock. Alkali, wet wool, and under it something soured, the country past the Jade Gate, where the archive maps gave out and some scribe a hundred years dead had painted one word across the empty silk: waste.

The rider came off before the animal had rightly stopped, so that he half fell against its neck and hung there getting his legs under him. Face black with sun and salt. A splinter the length of a chopstick had pinned his left sleeve to the shoulder-leather, and the cloth under it was stiff and dark and did not shift when he shifted. He asked for no gatekeeper. He skidded the dispatch-pouch across the flags and got three words out before the horse went down on its knees behind him, slow, like a camel kneeling.

"The northern wolves."

Then it was all sleeves and shouting down there, low officials running the way hens run, every way and none. The word came up the stair quicker than the men on it. The Northern Xiongnu were down through the passes again, firing the hamlets, driving the colonists off like stock. At a place called Kanche they'd penned the men in a granary and burned it with the men inside and stood the women in front of it to watch, and then taken the women. That was the shape the thing had by the second floor. It might have grown on the stairs. Rumours do. Or it might have come in whole and true off that horse, which was the worse thought, so he put it down.

Under the loud word came a quiet one, the one that counted. General Dou Gu had the standing armies mustering at Jiuquan. This spring, the Emperor meant for the legions to march north and finish the wolves for good and all.

Not one bent head in the hall came up. Thirty men kept their eyes to the silk. Feng's brush went on. Scrape. Dot. West of here the border posts were burning and the women of Kanche were walking behind ponies, and here the salt line still had to add.

Ban Chao looked at his hand and it was not steady.

He'd always supposed that when a thing finally moved in him it would come as fear. It was not fear. It sat lower than that, under the ribs, and it wanted out the way a sneeze wants out, no vote taken. Odd, what a man thinks of. He thought of the strap on his left sandal, which had been meaning to break for a month. He thought of the character yong, everlasting, and how his wrist would go on making it whether he was in the room or not.

One floor up his brother Ban Gu was writing that the Han was a dragon. Wind for its breath. Spears of the van for its teeth. Ban Chao had fair-copied that very line in the winter, had thought it fine, had read it aloud to Meijun over the millet and she'd said mm, and gone on eating.

"A dragon," he said.

"Eh?" Feng didn't stop. "Lighter. You're off the line."

"Paper. A paper dragon." It came up louder than he'd meant and it carried, and the hush took it and made it too big. "We sit here counting threads like old wives in a silk shop and they water their horses at our."

He didn't finish it. Didn't need to.

Heads came up down the row. Pale faces, ink on the brows, blinking at him the way you blink at a lamp swung too near.

"Ban Chao." Feng's hand stopped at last. The date shifted to the other cheek. "For your father's name, boy. The Inspector's on the floor today. Sit."

"My father crossed the Qinling behind the Han." He was on his feet. He had no memory of standing. "Not to breed a man who counts rusted nails."

The stool went over and cracked flat on the tile, loud as a shield dropped. Two mats down a clerk flinched so hard he blotted his own page, then sat staring at the blot, his morning gone, Ban Chao already nothing to him.

The brush was still in his fist. His name was on the shaft, small, cut by a knife-seller by the east market who'd overcharged him and thrown in a chipped seal-stone he had never once used, that sat at home in a drawer under Meijun's spare needles, and why he thought of the needles now he could not have said.

"A man worth anything wins his name out there. In the saddle." His throat had gone tight. Some old border song was up in it, half the words wrong. "The way Zhang Qian did, opening the road west. Down the notch of a bow. Not the split of a quill. And if my house must write this age down, let them write my part in what I leave on the sand."

It sounded, even to him, a little like something his brother Ban Gu would put in a mouth.

"Sit. Down." The Assistant Inspector came up the aisle, ivory tally raised like a switch, his face the grey of cold tallow. "You are an archivist. Ban Chao. Your father's merit bought that mat. You throw it in the dirt, you throw your mother in the east-market gutter to hold out a bowl. Is that the thing you'd have said of you? Is it? Is it, then?"

Ban Chao looked at him. Then past him, at the thirty, whose heads were already going back down to the silk, back to the scratch of soot on hemp, every one of them glad in his gut it was another man on his feet. He thought of the mouse he'd reported twice. Of Wei's clean hand carried out feet-first between the lamps. Of twenty more years of grey river-mist off the Luo River. He did not think anything noble. He was too angry to be noble, and he knew it, and that made him angrier.

His eye caught the inkstone. His grandfather's. The one thing of any worth that had come down the line to him, grey Duan stone, the dish worn shallow by three men's hands, half full now with the morning's black.

He picked it up. Heavier than it looked. Cold on the under-side.

He threw it at the wall.

It struck below the Dunhuang shelf and did not break, being good stone, and the ink came out of it in one long black tongue and hit the plaster and ran, and the pine-soot stink went up over that end of the hall. The stone dropped, rolled a half-turn on the tile, lay still. A dark spatter crossed the near edge of his own scroll. Nanyang cloth. The salt line. A month of clean nights, gone under it.

Nobody spoke. The cat had got itself under a bin.

The brush was still in his other hand, the dry one. He closed his fist on it. Old shaft. It did not bend. It went with a crack that ran up into the rafters.

He dropped the two halves in the wet.

"Keep the millet," he told Feng.

Feng said nothing. He'd laid his own brush across his stone and was watching the ink crawl down the plaster, and then watching Ban Chao, and for once the date sat still in his cheek. Something went across the old bent face. Ban Chao couldn't read it and hadn't the time. He stepped over the fallen stool and went out down the row toward the iron gates and the western road, Jiuquan, and whatever the maps would not put a name to past the Jade Gate. His sandal strap chose the doorway to break, and he walked out into the yard with it flapping, and did not stop to see to it. Behind him, after a while, a clerk got up with a rag and started, quiet, to save what could be saved of the wall.