Chapter 21

His opening still followed the principle of a reading-comprehension question — set out the source material first, then extend into a view — and at this kind of opening Zhuo Siheng was nothing if not adept. He wrote that the Grand Historian's angle in appraising model officials came from "to discharge one's office and follow good order is likewise to govern," holding that to observe and enforce the state's laws was the most important criterion for a model official; while Ban Mengjian held that "where he dwells the people prosper, and where he departs the people long for him" was the key to a model official — with much of the grand-argument flair of Mencius.

Here Zhuo Siheng turned his brush to set out his own view: as he saw it, the two men's positions seemed to diverge, but both were expressions of loyalty; and loyalty meant fidelity to the affairs of state. Law and the people were alike the foundation of the state, and to judge a model official by these two was to measure an official's worth by the interest of the state. Therefore to hold office was to be loyal to the affairs of state, to labor and worry for the country's sake. This, too, was his own heart's true standard for a model official.

So the question arose: if he chose model officials for the crown prince by this standard, what problems would come of it? First, it would cause a misunderstanding — some would feel that to be loyal to the crown prince over being loyal to the emperor was overstepping and insubordination. In fact this was gravely mistaken. Was the crown prince not himself a foundation-pillar of the state? Why else would dynasty after dynasty have set such store by the establishing and deposing of crown princes? To be loyal to the crown prince was to affirm His Majesty's decision, to safeguard the foundation of the state — the two were in truth one and the same. Only, many people delighted in confusing these two points, as if they'd seized on some crucial topic, and made endless fuss of it; such people were not fit to enter the Eastern Palace and assist the crown prince, still less fit to assist the emperor at court.

Such men have not the talent to serve the heir; they can scarcely serve the sage-emperor — how much less serve the state?

All right — a cutting enough rebuke. Zhuo Siheng felt a fierce satisfaction, as if he'd vented, on behalf of his grandfather and his father, twenty years' worth of pent-up ill air.

But he hadn't rebuked enough yet.

He dipped and evened the ink again, and wrote on:

Second, one had to consider what choices of talent the age's circumstances offered to suit the political climate of the moment. Let us return to the sources: Ban Mengjian's "Biographies of Model Officials" in the Book of Han sets out the political climates in which the officials of three reigns stood. Emperor Wu drove back the barbarians on every frontier — he was a fierce man, and so used fierce ministers, and the climate within the court and without was striving and vigorous. Emperor Zhao ascended the throne in his tender years, and court affairs were Huo Guang's to decide; but in that time there was a more tolerant climate of opinion — the worthy and good, for instance, could come to court and debate affairs of state with the officials at the empire's center, which is how the Discourses on Salt and Iron came to leave its fragrance to posterity — in short, a phase of fairly stable transition, which laid for the people the foundation of a settled life. Emperor Xuan was of another order: he had known real hardship among the common folk, and so saw to everything himself, wishing to work for the people's welfare and be the model for the officials of the realm; in that period the officials were of one heart and one mind, and together wrought a restoration. From these sources we learn that the political climate can often determine the course of an age. And the climate of the Eastern Palace is in fact sometimes complementary to the climate of court and country: how the emperor wishes the crown prince to be nurtured is of great importance, and the emperor's own attitude toward affairs of state is of great importance too. The climate of the Eastern Palace must not differ from that of the larger environment, or else a discordant note will be struck, giving rise to suspicion and shaking the foundation of the state.

When calamity forks and the climates eye each other askance, suspicion springs up on both sides — this is the very fountainhead of the disordering of the state's foundation.

When he'd finished, Zhuo Siheng read it over to himself and thought: surely not, surely not? Surely there wasn't a blind man alive who couldn't see he was writing about why Xiaozong deposed the treasonous heir?

The second point done, the third had brewed to readiness in his mind, and in one continuous breath he launched a fierce assault on the heart of his argument:

Third — what kind of crown prince the state needs is the most important thing of all. And for this it is no use for the emperor alone to understand it; whether the whole court, civil and military, understands it is what matters. Sometimes the emperor understands, but cannot help it if his officials feign muddle-headedness; and there have been, in dynasty after dynasty, emperors who simply did not understand, and then however well the officials understood, they could only remonstrate, and the outcome might not be all one wished — yet for the sake of fidelity to the affairs of state, this too is a duty a minister must strive his utmost to fulfill. Our dynasty now awaits its restoration: the court needs officials who dare to think about how to break through, and the Eastern Palace too needs officials who dare to think about how to cultivate, for the affairs of state, men who can truly uphold the emperor's ideals. Such men, assisting the crown prince, can make high and low of one heart and one mind, all giving off their light and heat together for a fine future — rather than wasting their time on suspicion and factional strife, so that those who come after cannot put their minds to good work, but must first clear the battlefield and cleanse the administration before they can throw themselves into the affairs of state.

When the former usurps the throne and the latter toils and worries, their striving to make good cannot keep pace with the long hollowing of the worm-rot — it cannot be sustained.

After a pause of the brush, without even hesitating, he added one more line:

In this there is already a precedent to look back on; it is truly no reckless judgment.

Good, good — time to close.

The ending was easy: restate his core argument of "for the affairs of state," return to the source material of the parent question, tie back once more to the views of the Grand Historian and Ban Mengjian, and finish.

Having finished, Zhuo Siheng felt the joy of having spoken his mind straight out; only, perhaps from too much fatigue, his eyes were a little blurred. He rubbed them, and still felt it was somewhat dark around him.

Something was wrong.

In this tiny square of a world it was hard to feel time passing; but looking up and peering out below the curtain, and hearing the evening drum sound its first beat along with the growling of his empty stomach, Zhuo Siheng realized with a start that it was nearly the closing time.

And he hadn't yet copied his essay onto the exam paper!

The dynasty's examinations strictly forbade continuing by candlelight: not only were candidates forbidden to bring candles into the hall, but the previous dynasty's custom of specially granting three candles for night answering had been abolished too. So after the forty-nine beats of the evening drum, candidates would be unable to go on answering, for the dark.

Zhuo Siheng went into a state of frenzied acceleration, his ink-grinding no different from wound-up clockwork; he spread out the exam paper, ran the brush copying, and just managed to finish transcribing the essay before the sun fully set and the dark drowned every stroke — and he let out a long breath at last.

And then all at once he felt his whole body aching and numb, his arms above all, almost unable to lift them; between the earlier tension and the continuous writing, his body truly couldn't quite bear it. He forced down a little food, and his head swimming, lay down and fell asleep at once.

Luckily the fur-lined blanket brought from home was enough to keep out the wind and cold, and the next day, apart from his nose and face being red with cold and his forehead numb, his hands and feet — most important of all — were tolerably comfortable.

And by the sound of it, his two "neighbors" next door were in no good state — one coughing from the cold, one sneezing from the wind.

In the early morning clean water was handed out; having rinsed his mouth, washed his face and eaten, he came to the second day's "discourse" battle.

The discourse questions were relatively simple and brief, rather like short-answer questions, mostly to do with law, the meaning of the classics, and state policy — these, in Zhuo Siheng's view, were the don't-lose-points questions, the sort of groundwork that comes earlier in a paper: so long as one answered earnestly according to what one had learned, one oughtn't to lose marks.

Only, the prefectural exam had had no more than five such questions, with time to spare; but the departmental exam had as many as fifteen! Zhuo Siheng counted among the quicker-thinking, faster-answering sort of candidate, and even so this time he didn't finish until the evening drum's last ten beats.

So by the end of the second day he was already exhausted to the utmost, his whole body sore and weak with no release to be had in the cell; he could only go on curling his body into a corner of the cold night and, braving the sneezes and coughs next door, fall dead asleep as if into a swoon.

He opened his eyes to find it was at last the final day; but the Zhuo Siheng of this day had none of the spirit with which he'd written the policy essay on the first. Even opening his eyes took the utmost effort; his whole body was stiff, and stretching his arms a few times at his seat was the only exercise he'd had these days besides writing and grinding ink. Today his appetite was very poor, but he forced down a good deal, thinking that the final day tested "poetry" and he must on no account slacken; so he swabbed his neck with the icy-cold water, which jolted him so his whole body nearly leapt up, waking him thoroughly from brain to nerve-center, and setting him into a battle-ready state.

The questions were handed out; unsealing it, he saw the prompt:

Compose a poem on history; restricted to five-character regulated verse; allusions restricted to the Four Histories; rhyme on the "thirteen-yuan" category.

Zhuo Siheng wondered whether the emperor had lately taken a particular liking to the Four Histories — how was it that, from the prefectural exam to the departmental, they kept wrangling with these same few books?

His other poetry was really quite ordinary; only his poems on history, using allusions, came out tolerably neat. Restricting the allusions was fine — he could recount the Four Histories with ease — but restricting the rhyme made it harder still.

Zhuo Siheng used a dozen-odd sheets of draft paper before settling on a final version, then cut and revised and weighed a few more characters, and finally finished copying it out:

I wipe the worn stele to read the verdicts of old; moonlight floods the plain of Maoling. In its glory it had its Su and its Zhang to lose; in its rising it knew its Wei and its Huo come home. Was the Household General alone in his grieving? Commandant Zhang, more solitary still on his lone road. The ramparts of Han are beacon-fires now — shall the peachwood ever be set alight again?

It was as if setting down the last stroke used up the last remnant of all his strength; when the official outside the curtain collected the paper, his hands were shaking — not from fear or worry, but as if he could no longer hold even a sheet of paper.

At last the three-day departmental exam was over. The setting sun drew its last light close about it as the compound gates were unsealed and thrown wide again — only, those coming out now were scholars worn out of all human shape. The cloud-grasping youths, every one in the flush of his prime three days before, were now, one more than the next, sallow-faced as though sick, half like corpses, shifting on limp and strengthless feet, dragging bit by bit, bit by bit, bodies that had spent every last dram of heart, mind and strength over the compound's threshold.

Those come to meet their own candidates all had to wait beyond a marked line, not a step over it. Seeing their half-dead candidates struggling to walk, they could hardly keep from rushing up to haul them into the carriages and rush them home for reviving.

When Zhuo Siheng had come out of the prefectural exam he'd still had the strength to walk on his own; the departmental exam left him utterly spent. His cousin's having him share the family carriage earlier had been true foresight — had he to walk to the capital's outskirts now, he'd probably have gone straight off to report his exam results to his parents.

Fan Yong had been waiting anxiously all the while; he saw Zhuo Siheng first, and once he'd crossed the line rushed up to half-carry, half-push him to the carriage to sit a moment, then went to look for Fan Xiliang. Only he didn't see him at all.

Zhuo Siheng was dizzy and seeing spots; between gasps he heard a clamor of shouting, and in the corner of his swimming vision saw Tong Shipei being held up on either side by two men dressed as house-servants, dragged along as if abducted — the youth who only days before had laughed and played without a care, brimming with life, now no different from a dead man. Only, when they reached his family's carriage, an old man came stumbling down from it to steady Tong Shipei, the ache and anxiety on his face beyond all words.

Zhuo Yan had told Zhuo Siheng that great families generally did not go in for parents coming out to meet a child sitting an exam — all the more so with someone in the household holding office, who all but had to stay away, so as not to invite suspicion; a father naturally wouldn't come. And some candidates cared about face too — himself, for instance: in his day he'd flatly refused to let his own mother come meet him, terrified of being gossiped about. Most of those who came from a family were brothers of the same generation or cousins; some grandparents, doting on their grandchildren, came to meet them too, and that was only human feeling, on which no one would remark. But in truth, what parent didn't worry when his own child came to sit an exam? So long as the family was in the capital, they would be watching and waiting on tiptoe, if not at the compound then at their own gate; and later on, many parents, truly unable to set their minds at rest, came after all — only they'd hide away in the carriage and not come down, having the household servants bring the child back to the carriage, where they'd fuss over and dote on him to their hearts' content.

The old man who'd come trembling down from the carriage must be Tong Shipei's grandfather, Zhuo Siheng supposed.

The other scholars — apart from those who'd come from afar — all had someone to meet them, those with temporary lodgings in the capital or family along. Quite a few elderly women, seeing their sons and grandsons come out like this, climbed down from their carriages in tears, crying "my darling" and "my child"; and from the parents who stayed hidden in their carriages and wouldn't show their faces, one could always see, as the servants carried a scholar in, a pair of official's sleeves reach out from behind the curtain, strong hands taking the insensible scholar into the cabin.

If his father and mother were still alive, and saw the state he was in now, how it would grieve them.

Zhuo Yan would surely never have sat calmly in a carriage — a mere qualifying exam had left him unable to sit or lie still, let alone the departmental exam; he'd surely have been willing to lose face and come out to fret over his son. And Song Liangyu would surely have been in tears long since, wiping the beads of sweat from his brow with her gentle hand.

But Zhuo Siheng could now only recast these things that had never happened through imagination; he had no one to lean on now, and must become the one others leaned on.

He envied Tong Shipei — envied all the scholars who had someone to meet them, envied every pair of a family's hands stretched out toward them.

And his own cousin, whose father was alive and well, was at this moment stumbling along in a daze, able to go forward only because Fan Yong dragged him.

Zhuo Siheng hurried over to support his cousin. Fan Xiliang saw him and seemed to want to smile, but couldn't; seemed to want to call out "Cousin," but moving his broken, chapped lips was the limit of what he could manage.

Just as weakly, Zhuo Siheng shook his head to tell him he needn't say anything, and with the support of Fan Yong's strong frame the two of them got into the carriage together, gradually leaving the clamor behind and driving toward the Fan mansion.