Chapter 7

Before setting out for Ningshuo City, the seat of Shuozhou prefecture, Zhuo Yan and Zhuo Siheng put on their best cloth robes.

The two robes had come when they first settled at Xingshan Township, brought back from the exile district by someone Zhu Tong asked. The man said somebody in the capital had arranged them and named the Zhuo family. Zhu Tong had him carry word back that the Zhuo family had been amnestied and moved to Xingshan Township. After that, the clothes his aunt sent came straight to the house — still with no note or letter, and still with a plump little duck embroidered inside a hem as a mark.

Zhuo Yan judged that she was keeping these gifts out of sight, so the family couldn't write back openly to thank her. That might only cause her trouble. All they could do was give some local produce to whoever brought the things and ask him to pass on word of how the family was doing and their gratitude, privately, along with extra coppers and instructions to be careful, and on no account to make things difficult for her.

Even without any contact, the clothes that arrived grew larger with the years and more varied in style. Zhuo Siheng used to get mostly short jackets; this year they'd begun sending round-collared, narrow-sleeved robes suited to his age. To keep them from being skimmed on the road, most were half-worn rather than new, but they were always spotless and carefully pressed, neat and plain in cut. You could see the care in it. The one odd thing was the hair ribbons that came now and then for the two girls, which were rather too gaudy. Huiheng and Ciheng had grown up in a bitter cold place and then the countryside, and neither cared much about clothes or ornament. Plain and tidy was enough for them, and the ribbons went unused. Zhuo Yan only said they were probably what little girls in the capital were wearing now, and had them put away even if nobody used them. His wife's sister had meant well.

With the clothes on for the trip, Zhuo Yan looked his son over, admiration he couldn't hide in his eyes.

Siheng looked very much like his mother's side. Zhuo Yan and his two brothers had all been sword-browed and bright-eyed, each more striking than the last. His wife's family — three sisters and brothers — all had fine features and soft outlines, mild and unhurried, with still deep water in their eyes. Zhuo Siheng had got that clean, composed look and bearing from Song Liangyu. He was thirteen this year, with a young man's frame, and even in a thin old blue-green robe he stood tall and straight. Every gesture showed the refinement of a scholar, and with it an upright gentleness and a clear gaze.

Zhuo Yan thought too that the boy dealt with people plainly and honestly — none of the flippancy you saw in most young men, and none of the shrinking either. True, his son carried himself with measure, held himself in, everything just right; but he had a competitive streak as well. When he read, sunk in it completely, those ink-dark eyes held the family's own cool, undistracted focus. Answering questions, he was confident and sure, a light in his eyes. Since his voice had broken, his speech came clear and cadenced, rising and falling with force, and now and then there was a who-but-me air to his bearing. In character and looks he'd hold his own against any young gentleman of a great house in the capital.

Zhuo Siheng didn't notice that his father had been watching him the whole way. His head was full of the examination.

Huiheng, Ciheng and Xiheng saw the two of them off to the ox-cart by the village road. Village Head Wu was there too, with the parents of a few township children, waiting to send them off. Father and son thanked each one before climbing onto the cart and waving goodbye. Ciheng and the little ones kept shouting for Zhuo Siheng to do well. The cart turned past the creek bridge, and Xingshan Township and the people seeing them off dropped out of sight; those bright, ringing children's voices were washed over by the glad summer creek.

Zhuo Siheng's heart settled again.

He ran a quick summary in his head of how his studies had gone since he first started to read.

There had been no real books during the exile, but he'd had a father who taught him by word and example — a jinshi, seventh in the second rank at the palace examination. So his threshold for getting started had actually been lower than for many a poor scholar. In the five years at the place of banishment he had worked through the Four Books and the Five Classics, and had studied closely even much of the Wen Xuan and the Qianjia Shi, whatever Zhuo Yan could still recite off by heart.

After they came to Xingshan Township and the family were free again, Zhuo Yan came into a small income, though not in cash. On the two days a month school was closed, he would go along with villagers heading to Ningshuo City, the prefectural seat, and trade the grain, mountain goods and homespun cloth his students' families gave him for silver, buying daily necessities and the four treasures of the study, and now and then bringing back a secondhand book or two. So Zhuo Siheng got to read other works of the classics, histories, masters and collections as well. It didn't just widen what he knew — his writing came on by leaps and bounds that year.

And as far back as half a year ago, every ten days Zhuo Yan had been running Zhuo Siheng through mock examinations to gauge where he stood, setting the questions to match the qualifying examination. Zhuo Yan had sat the prefectural examination himself as a student of the Imperial Academy, so he had never taken the qualifying examination — but he had once served as director in the Bureau of Sacrifices under the Ministry of Rites, in charge of the lower-level local examinations across the country. Every paper had passed under his eye for comment before it was sent up and issued. No one knew the tricks of setting the questions better.

Through all those mock examinations, Zhuo Siheng had long since worked out the scope of the qualifying examination: ten tie on the Analects; ten moyi on the Doctrine of the Mean and the Book of Rites; five dayi on the Great Learning, the Mencius and the Book of Documents; and one recitation from the Classic of Filial Piety.

Which was to say: ten fill-in-the-blanks on the Analects, ten define-the-terms on the Doctrine of the Mean and the Book of Rites, five short-answer questions on the Great Learning, the Mencius and the Book of Documents, and one reading-comprehension passage on the Classic of Filial Piety.

The truly terrifying parts — the poetry, the argumentative essay on the classics, and the policy-response essay — were all outside the scope of this qualifying exam.

Each time, from the look on his father's face as he stared at the paper — relieved, satisfied, moved and admiring all at once — Zhuo Siheng could tell that earning this qualification wouldn't be hard.

Sizing up his own level wasn't about pride or complacency. It was to give himself a firm, steady frame of mind going into the exam.

After thinking it through, Zhuo Siheng found his way back to the state of mind he'd had for exams in his old life.

The wild track was hard going, but after a night's rest at a post station, the next day the ox-cart hadn't gone far before it joined the highroad, and the way grew much easier. Before noon Ningshuo City in the distance had begun to show its cold, set gray face, like a giant lifting its head above the plain to watch the travelers making their slow way along the road.

Ningshuo City was the only walled city in all three commanderies of Shuozhou, and the seat of the Shuozhou prefecture.

Years ago, after Emperor Wu the founder had pacified the north, he stood on Mount Fanyan and looked out over the plain at its foot, and remarked to his officers that with Shuozhou taken, the northern lands would be at peace from now on. His officials cried "Ten thousand years!" and the founder ordered a city built on the plain to serve as the administrative seat, granting it the name Ningshuo — Shuozhou at peace — to mark the martial feat of enlarging the realm.

A hundred years of wind and frost on, Ningshuo City's tall rammed-earth walls now enclosed one of the few dense knots of people in this remote prefecture. Between the stone-brick parapet and the crenellations stood soldiers holding lances and pikes upright. Before the gate ran a moat and an earthen embankment, and the embankment was planted thick with white birch, spruce and alder — all tall, straight trees, near as high as the wall. Being a fortress city at a military chokepoint, Ningshuo posted a guard detail of ten men on either side of the gate and the bridge road, checking the carts and travelers passing through.

At the gate barrier below the wall, Zhuo Yan called Zhuo Siheng down from the cart.

Even in his past life Zhuo Siheng had only been a young man of nineteen. Being reborn had deepened his experience and worldliness all over again, but there was still a spark of youth in his nature, and on top of that the old failing of an outsized curiosity. So the first time he saw a bustling town after coming here, he couldn't quite hold in his delight. Jumping down from the cart, his gaze still lingering where the city wall met the blue sky, an open, happy ease filled his young face.

It was rare to see such a look on his son, and it pleased Zhuo Yan too. Carried along by it, he told Siheng some of Ningshuo City's history and old stories, and Zhuo Siheng listened to all of it with relish. By the time he'd finished, the two of them had passed the checkpoint and entered the city.

To Zhuo Siheng it was all wide streets and lively shops, bustling beyond anything — but then he heard his father say, low: "The capital is grand and teeming, ten thousand times finer than this."

There was a bitter, wistful weight in the old man's voice.

Zhuo Siheng wanted to comfort his father, then thought that only if he did well and brought the whole family back to the capital would his father truly be able to set it down and be at peace; anything said now would be useless. That thought brought back the thin boy he had seen in the snow when they left the labor camp — Gao Yongqing. How were his studies going in Qingzhou? Did he still remember the promise the two of them made at parting, to bring their old fathers back to the capital together?

Every year at this time the Education Office in the prefectural yamen was so busy it had to detail extra clerks just to handle the qualifying-examination paperwork. But when Zhuo Yan and Zhuo Siheng arrived, the Shuozhou Education Office was deserted — there wasn't even a line. Zhuo Yan handed over the household statement and the certificate of guarantee, both stamped with the village head's seal; once they had been checked, Zhuo Siheng signed his own guarantee, and a drowsy old registrar stamped the three documents with the official seal, and that was that.

"They don't check the household registry?" Zhuo Siheng had expected the whole thing to be complicated; who'd have thought the formalities would be this simple.

Zhuo Yan smiled. "It's only after you pass that they send it up to be checked, and then they issue you an entry ticket as proof of your place in the prefectural examination. At that point your guarantor won't be a local clerk, but a juren of the prefecture who holds a degree — though Shuozhou likely hasn't got one, in which case a commissioned official of this prefecture vouches for you, the prefectural office verifies it, and the Education Office takes in the paper and files it. A small exam like the qualifying one doesn't need checking and verifying up front. That would be far too much fuss."

Zhuo Siheng nodded. Now that sounded more like the proper administrative process for verifying candidates at a real exam.

"Only, when you sit that one, you'll have to go to —"

Listening as he went, Zhuo Siheng followed his father to the courtyard gate of the Education Office, when the old registrar — dead to the world and half-asleep a moment ago — sprang up like some medical miracle, stumbled out of the hall at a run, and shot through the gate a step ahead of them, cutting Zhuo Yan off.

Sound of limb, then. Shuozhou's climate might not do much for your health, Zhuo Siheng thought, but the work was light and the office quiet — a fine posting for an old man.

"Vice-Prefect Zhou, why have you come yourself...?" The old registrar bowed shakily toward an official sedan chair that had just stopped outside the gate, no one out of it yet. Only after he'd spoken did a middle-aged official step down, in a wide-sleeved official robe, and say with an easy, good-humored smile, "Registrar Zhang, you work hard at your post. I've brought my boy to submit his qualifying-examination papers. Sorry to trouble you, sorry to trouble you."

From the exchange, the newcomer was presumably the Vice-Prefect of Shuozhou.

"Father, a vice-prefect is about senior sixth rank, isn't he? Aren't the sons of officials at that rank allowed into the prefectural school without the qualifying exam? Why come and sit it?" Zhuo Siheng asked under his breath, puzzled. But his father said nothing for a long while, and when he drew his eyes back to look at Zhuo Yan, he found him frozen where he stood.

Just then a boy of around ten, expensively dressed, climbed down from a second chair behind. The official they'd called Vice-Prefect Zhou beckoned him forward to make his greeting to Registrar Zhang, who said hastily, "If the young master Zhou wished to try his hand, you'd only to send word and have the household statement and certificate of guarantee brought round. How could we let Your Honor make the trip in person...?"

Zhuo Siheng got it. The vice-prefect probably wanted the boy to get some practice and a feel for the exam hall, so even with the qualification already in hand, he'd come to have a go. Whether that was within the rules, Siheng had no idea.

He was about to ask his father again, but Zhuo Yan was still staring at the gate, not moving.

Vice-Prefect Zhou had already come in, and he saw Zhuo Yan and Zhuo Siheng too.

He stopped short.

Zhuo Siheng watched his father and the vice-prefect look at each other — one blank-faced, the other pale, neither expression a pleasant one — and knew the two must be acquainted. But it clearly wasn't the warm way it had been with Uncle Gao and his father; there might even be some bad blood between them, for their meeting held no joy of reunion, only a strange, wrong air.

Zhuo Yan had come back to himself, and made a scholar's greeting, a slight dip of the shoulders and a nod. Seeing it, Zhuo Siheng bent at the waist, raised his arms and lowered his head, the way he'd greeted Uncle Gao.

The courtyard fell quiet. For a long moment nothing happened; then the vice-prefect walked past the two Zhuos with his son and his attendants.

And Zhuo Yan, with Zhuo Siheng, left without looking back.

"Father, you know each other?" Zhuo Siheng felt he needed to know, and to help ease whatever it was. If some knot in his father's heart wouldn't come loose and he fell ill again from brooding, the way he had last winter, that would be bad.

But Zhuo Yan only patted his shoulder and said calmly, "I'll tell you after the exam. Come on, let's go buy you a new brush."

Father and son stayed three days at a cheap inn in the city. The communal bunks there were cheap, and Zhuo Yan thought to take one himself and book a small room for Zhuo Siheng — but Siheng wouldn't have it. There was no need to spend that kind of money on an exam like this, he said, and Zhuo Yan couldn't talk him round and had to agree.

The communal bunks at this inn were mostly porters and peddlers passing through; the slightly more respectable traveling merchants all took the little rooms upstairs. So at night the snoring rose and fell on every side, and the smells were rich and varied too. To Zhuo Siheng, bad as it was, it still beat the conditions in the exile district, and he actually slept soundly all three nights, and got up bright and early on the day of the exam, brisk and full of spirit. Zhuo Yan much admired the way his son took things as they came, but for fear the praise would go to his head and cost him his steadiness in the exam, he kept it to himself.

In truth he himself was far more nervous than his son.

The qualifying examination wasn't the ordeal the prefectural and departmental examinations were — it ran only half a day — but still he couldn't sit or lie easy. Catching himself at it, he couldn't help a private, wry laugh: he hadn't been this anxious answering in the golden hall of the palace all those years ago. But it was his own son going into the exam hall now, and however fine the boy was, how was a father to feel easy?

That morning Zhuo Yan took Zhuo Siheng to a breakfast stall. All these days they'd been eating the dry rations brought from home to save money, but this morning his father ordered him congee with a few small dishes, and a little plate of pale-yellow cakes that smelled fresh and fragrant.

"Before the prefectural and departmental examinations, students have a custom of eating Guanghan cake, to court good luck. Gao, cake, sounds like passing the exam and rising in rank, and Guanghan means plucking the cassia — all auspicious. The taste is really quite ordinary, not near as good as the five-spice cake you take in to eat during the exam." Zhuo Yan looked at his son, listening in earnest, and pushed the plate toward him. "They don't go in for that here; you can't buy either kind. There's only this yellow-millet cake the shop pounds itself. Eat some, and it'll count for the same good omen."

Zhuo Siheng didn't actually believe in any of it. Before the gaokao he hadn't bought a blessing-brush from a Confucius temple or eaten a grilled carp for luck the way his classmates had, and he'd still come out first in the whole province — proof enough that mysticism was no match for solid ability. But he saw that his father had ordered food only for him, with nothing in front of himself, and how could a parent's tenderness fail to move him? So he pushed the congee back and took the yellow-millet cake instead. "All right, I'll eat this for the good luck. Father, you have some too."

"I've had the dry rations, I'm not hungry."

"Then if I have the millet cake and the congee and dishes on top of it, I'll be too full and get drowsy answering the questions — but it'd be a waste not to eat it. Father, you have it."

Zhuo Siheng knew how to word it so his father would pick up the chopsticks. Sure enough, Zhuo Yan understood the filial meaning behind it and stopped refusing, and the two of them set to breakfast together. Zhuo Yan had taught the children not to talk while eating or sleeping, and all of them but Ciheng could keep to it honestly. They finished the meal without a word, settled the bill, and set off for the prefectural yamen.

In a remote place like Shuozhou there were few scholars, and fewer still sitting for a degree. On the day of the qualifying examination, the Education Office had only to clear out a single hall and it was enough. Most of those testing were children of fifteen or sixteen and under; counting the parents and servants who'd come to see them off, there weren't twenty people at the gate. By Zhuo Siheng's rough count, no more than five or six were actually going in.

Zhuo Yan handed Zhuo Siheng the basket Huiheng had woven from fine rattan, and went through his reminders one more time. "Read carefully first, take up the brush with care, don't ruin the paper. Any question you can't call to mind right off, skip it for now. I've ground some ink for you and put it in that little wax-sealed wooden box — don't grind your own to start with, write with that first, and grind more only if it runs short..."

Zhuo Siheng didn't find it tiresome. He just listened, smiling quietly, and gave an obedient, earnest nod at each item, until even Zhuo Yan felt he was going on too long and let him hurry inside.

But at the doorway, as he handed the door clerk all the sealed documents to be checked off one by one and let him search the basket and his person for anything smuggled in, Zhuo Siheng looked back — and saw his father standing where they'd said goodbye, watching him. That once tall, straight figure had taken on a slight stoop; the old brown cloth robe, worn white where it had been washed thin, gave off a faint fuzz of lint that drifted and swayed in the pale-gold light of the morning.

Something caught in Zhuo Siheng's throat, and a bottomless ache washed through him. Except for his mother's death, none of the hardships since they'd come to this place had made him want to weep as much as this moment did.

Zhuo Siheng called to him, "Father, don't stand out in the sun. Go rest in the tea shed — I'll be out as soon as the exam's done."

Zhuo Yan answered him with a smile of boundless tenderness and eyes full of buried worry, and waved him on to get inside. Zhuo Siheng looked back twice more before, at the clerk's urging, he stepped into the qualifying-examination hall.