Chapter 79

"My lord! I can't do it!"

Zhuo Siheng had never seen Pan Guangling so frightened, white in the face and shaking as he spoke. He near jumped back a long step, waving his hands hard. "Let me go on with my work in the works office. I've still a good many things not started, and I can't put the crag kiln out of my mind!"

"So all that you once told me, about your heart being 'set on the people of a whole region,' about wanting to be a local official like Ximen Bao, was only to please your superior?" Zhuo Siheng put on a face of sudden understanding.

"How would I dare! Every word I ever said to you, my lord, was from the heart!" Pan Guangling was near tears with urgency. "But to be administrator, I truly can't. I know nothing and can do nothing outside the works office. How could I carry so great a charge?"

Zhuo Siheng lifted his hem and sat back down with grace. "If you were born knowing the works office, then you truly are a prodigy. Isn't this just the thing to learn? Would you be a petty works clerk forever? You plainly hold a greater aim in your heart, so why shrink from the chance? Is it that you daren't trust my arrangement and my faith in you, or that you daren't trust your own ability and your own breadth?"

The sharp questions came in that soft, slow voice, and Pan Guangling was sweating more than he had on the ride, anxious and uneasy, with no clear answer to give.

Seeing how wretched he looked, Zhuo Siheng's heart softened, and he said soothingly, "To match a man to his post by his gifts is my own work, but to obey a superior's orders is yours just now. You can't shirk a thing with a hundred excuses only because you've never tried it. Think. If we were all like that, wouldn't the people live forever under the old abuses? You and I both long for the day the countryside is at peace, so would you only wait for others to bring it? In three years, when I'm moved on from here, what will you do? Wait for the next Zhuo Siheng to be posted in? And if the next man is a He Mengchun or a Cui Lu, what then? Go back to railing at the world with a bellyful of grievance, and waste your own years and the people's along with them? Xuehe. We who are magistrates to the people must never be so."

Pan Guangling heard him speak his courtesy name so gently, and every other word fell with a thousand pounds' weight. His heart was like a hundred rivers crashing to the sea, surging and racing everywhere. It was as if the man before him were not Vice-Prefect Zhuo but an elder brother teaching him with patient, pressing, heartfelt care, each line drawing him on toward reaches of the heart and corners of the world he'd never gone before.

Zhuo Siheng rose and stood before Pan Guangling, and looked into his eyes. "You said yourself that to seek rank and name is no bad thing, that the bad is to have only those two things in your heart. I believe you are not such a man. Your heart has room for the great work of the state, and a care for the common people too. I've been here near half a year, and two years and more from now, when my term is up and I'm moved on, what I most hope is that you'll take up all my government and all my plans. Only you have that child's heart that hasn't let its high aim fall, and can build with your own hands the settled, happy land you and I both see. Don't you want to watch the thing you dream of come true, bit by bit, by your own doing?"

He had a great deal more he could have said, but he stopped, because Pan Guangling had begun to weep.

"My lord... I'm afraid I'll do it badly..."

Pan Guangling wept like the big boy of a dozen-odd years he half still was, mouth twisting first in a whimper, then past all holding, and with no thought for manners wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

"I... I only don't want to fail my lord's teaching and trust!"

With that he dropped to his knees again, this time not to bow but to wrap his arms tight around Zhuo Siheng's waist, and began to sob aloud, crying as he sobbed, "My lord! I promise you! I'll not fail you! I'll be the best official in all Anhua, no, in all Jinzhou! I'll make the people here, every one, live good days! Not just fed and clothed! The kind of days where every soul is happy! I... I'll do it! I'll learn! I'll learn hard! I promise you! My lord... I promise you!"

Zhuo Siheng was moved, and a little at a loss to laugh or not. Well, his brothers and sisters, by blood and not by blood, were long past what one carriage would hold, and one more made no odds. The deeper in debt, the lighter a man wears it. So he patted the shoulder of Pan Guangling, who still clung to his waist and knelt there bawling, and said gently, "There, there. My own little brother never cried like this, and you're seven or eight years older than him. Why weep like a child? I know, I know. You can do it, surely. Come, stop crying, wipe your face. Cry your eyes swollen and how will you go back and face your fellows at the yamen?"

But the gentle comfort only set Pan Guangling off the harder, calling "my lord" one moment and "elder brother" the next, and clinging on for dear life. Such a creature of pure feeling Zhuo Siheng had near never met in the capital, and for all that it made him laugh and ache at once, it bred in him a true sense of a duty to teach and raise this man well from now on.

Out in the station yard, the courier stood holding the tea, white with fright, the sound of weeping still coming from the room. He asked Lu Hui in a shaky voice, "Station-master Lu... this Vice-Prefect Zhuo looks so mild and gentle. How can he be so fierce when an underling errs? A hard man like Officer Pan, scolded to this... I... I daren't go in..."

Lu Hui looked at the door the weeping came from, and took the tea-tray. "It's all right. It may not be a scolding at all. You go on down. I'll take it in a while. Best not break in on their real talk."

---

Back at his residence that day, Zhuo Siheng got the rest of the business arranged at last, charged Pan Guangling with the duties of the administrator's post in detail, and told him to take two days to learn from him the writing of dispatches and the knack of documents. Write them the old way again, he said, and he'd be sent to make poems and match couplets with Lord He, which so frightened Pan Guangling that he nodded yes at once, swearing to study hard at the craft of a civil officer.

But his official robe suffered for it. When it went to the servant to wash, the man took it that Lord Zhuo had been down to the villages again that day. They would never have guessed that the smears of snot and tears across the chest had been wept there by Anhua Commandery's new administrator.

Sitting in his study, Zhuo Siheng went over the days ahead. His meeting with Song Yunhe was set at the crag kiln, which let him look over the kiln's new firing on the same road. He had another thought in his heart too. Quality alone was not enough. The amount had to keep up with the demand. The crag kiln's ground was too small, with only three kiln-chambers, one for the plain body and two for the glaze, which truly would not do. He'd have to find ways to round out every side of it. All that called for a look on the spot.

Then there were the fields to be seen to, and the newly planted sisal gardens. He Mengchun left all of it to him, and he had to go down and look for himself.

Oh, and the matter of Lu Hui, though that was no hurry. Let the man talk it over with his mother and they'd settle it after, and the end of it would likely be much as he'd foreseen.

But Wang Botang had made no move since Cui Lu was taken, and that was a thing he could not leave unguarded.

Zhuo Siheng put his thoughts in order into the small hours, ate a little late supper, and only when the government business was straight turned to his letters. There was no family letter among them. Huiheng was likely worn with her exam and had no time to write, and by the count it should be about over. He wondered how his sister had done, and whether she'd worn herself out.

Thinking so, he leaned on the desk answering the letters that mattered, and perhaps because the day had truly been so tiring, fell asleep without knowing it.

---

The capital. The Tianzhang Hall.

The morning's grand audience over, the first person the emperor summoned for the Tianzhang Hall's daily business was the Grand Princess Xuanyi.

"You've been so busy these days, Brother, I couldn't get a look at you if I tried."

The Grand Princess came into the palace as if coming home, and did not, like most of the imperial house with their brother the sovereign, call him "imperial brother." "Brother" she had called him near thirty years, and never changed.

"You've been run off your feet yourself. A few days back Noble Consort Luo wished to hold a family feast for the summer solstice, and you were tied up marking the papers in person, as if you'd truly become the chief officer of the examinations. Well, have you thought of me now you're free?" The emperor finished with a smile, and sent people to fetch the tea and the dried fruits and sweets his sister liked, and bade them bring a soft cushion for her chair. In her early years, when her father died a condemned man and she was sent down to the back palace as a bondmaid, the princess had taken a cold ache in the waist and knees, and the emperor would not let her stand long. The palace physician who tended her at her own residence was there by imperial order for just this ailment.

The princess of course needed to stand on no ceremony with her brother the sovereign. She sat down smiling, and the palace people, long used to it, saw to all the small things by the emperor's word and withdrew by degrees, leaving the brother and sister to talk.

"I've done what you charged me with, Brother. The five chosen in the selection exam are fixed at last. My congratulations, Brother, on a reign whose tone of learning shines so bright, whose good governance reaches even the inner chambers. The women of our dynasty are all of them clear in the great principles and clean in their conduct, and the essays they wrote are truly worth a round of applause!" Warming to it, the Grand Princess could not help a light clap of her hands.

The emperor smiled, well pleased. "By that, there's an essay you liked very much?"

"Look at this one, Brother." The princess drew a folded paper from her sleeve and came up to hand it to her brother. "The scribe Luo and I have both set it first in the selection exam. This is the essay of a woman top-graduate of our dynasty."

She had a kind of sweet playfulness even when speaking of real business, and the emperor, charmed, said, "That Yuanzhu girl set so tricky a question, I thought no one would catch her eye, and here the two of you are of one mind on it. Then I must read it well."

What the princess had brought was the answer in the original hand. The emperor had no sooner opened it than he gave a small sound of surprise, and looked at his sister, a little startled. "This hand, this brushwork, how is it so familiar?"

The princess only smiled and would not say, and had him read on. The emperor laughed and scolded her for her airs of mystery, but read on in earnest, and without knowing it was drawn in by the essay. He was not a man to show his feeling lightly, but before his sister now he did not hide the wonder in his eyes, and sighed over the fine writing again and again. When he'd finished he shut it with a firm hand, loath to leave it. "Plain in word and straight in reason, elegant and free. Such a fine essay, and written by a girl of the inner chambers?"

"They answered on the spot. It was truly beyond anyone to find a stand-in, so it was surely a woman's own writing."

"Whose daughter is reared so far above the common?"

The princess only smiled, and drew out another paper, on which were listed the native places, lineages, and names of the five women. At the head stood the author of this essay:

First in the selection, Zhuo Huiheng, of the Zhuo house of Ningshuo Commandery, Shuozhou. Elder brother Zhuo Siheng, who holds by grace the full sixth rank, serving as vice-prefect of Anhua Commandery, Jinzhou.