Chapter 86

The lines of the oracle all came from the Songs of Chu, which Zhuo Siheng knew by heart, but recombined so, he could find no thread to follow.

The great shaman seemed not yet done. After the first lines the young woman in the bronze mask gave him more in court speech. "The great shaman says, you must be sure to remember this: the dragon begets nine sons, yet the hundred birds too come to court the phoenix."

This was more baffling still. Zhuo Siheng turned it over and could make nothing of it, and was about to ask, when the great shaman courteously saw him out, the young woman with him.

"It's long since the great shaman cast for anyone." After a while the young woman spoke suddenly. "The last time I came to Anhua Commandery..." but there she stopped, and let out not another word.

Zhuo Siheng could hardly press a young woman with this and that, so he changed the subject. "The hills and streams here are still the red earth and cold ridges of Min-Yue, yet the ways are wholly unlike those a hundred li off, full of the Chu country's own customs. That a small place like Jinzhou can gather so many kinds of people and life, truly it is a land that breeds rare folk."

The masked young woman seemed drawn by the turn, and asked, curious, "Are you a scholar come to travel here? Do you mean to write a travel-record and make a book of it?"

Zhuo Siheng had meant to answer plainly, but of a sudden the young woman's words lit a bright spark in his mind, and strung together a good many puzzles and regrets he'd carried since coming south. His heart leapt, and he said with a smile he could not help, "If it were so, that would be a fine thing. Those two years on the road south I turned every book I could, and what was written of Jinzhou was mostly its hills and waters, a line or two and little of its ways and relics and people, so that I had to learn from the local folk by word of mouth. If one could truly set down this place's things and ways and its history, would it not draw people the more to come and see? And leave besides a good help to learning, so this fine country could be passed on by men's hands."

With that he thanked the young woman in haste and went straight off.

The masked young woman stood where she was, watching Zhuo Siheng's back vanish into the crowd, and of a sudden laughed aloud.

By now Song Duan had thrown in his lot with the local folk. He had no word of the dialect, but he could drink, warm and hearty with no stiffness in him, and when a man handed him a half-gourd dipper brimming with country brew he took it and drank, and if it was a girl who held it out he drank it to the last drop and smiled at her. Song Duan was as handsome as they come, and had smiled a good many girls into crowding up to have him drink the wine they'd dipped.

Luckily Zhuo Siheng came in time to draw him out of the ring, and the two rested in the shade of a huge banyan, where Song Duan wiped the wine from the corner of his mouth with his sleeve. Watching his free, easy way, Zhuo Siheng thought that even grimy he had a born air of high spirits in every move.

"Young Master Song, you've lived here a good while with Manager Song. Have you ever heard of any record of Jinzhou's local ways and things?" Zhuo Siheng had sought him out with a real question.

"You can call me by my courtesy name, my lord." Song Duan broke in before Zhuo Siheng could speak, as if he already knew what he'd say. "Since we're far from the noise and fret here, I'll just call you Brother Zhuo in this place."

"Yuanda, then, since I'm the elder by a few years, I'll call you so." Zhuo Siheng could turn the smoothest, most fitting courtesies when he chose, but when he did not mean to fence he was always direct. "Your Third Uncle says you've in fact read a great many books, but mostly without chewing them over, and the more so since coming to Jinzhou, where you open a book wherever you find one, skim two pages and toss it aside. Have you read anything on this place?"

"There are plenty of books on the land and the hills and rivers here, the southern gazetteers set down a good deal, but a line or a sentence only, nothing worth the reading. Did the sight of this set you thinking of taking up the brush yourself, Brother Zhuo?"

Song Duan followed Zhuo Siheng's pace with ease, which took him aback. As a rule, apart from his own sister and brother, there was hardly a soul who could run at the same speed as his thoughts.

"If you mean to take up the brush, Brother Zhuo, you'd have to spend more time yet feeling out the ways and the people and the wild things of the place, and not Anhua only, but all four commanderies of Jinzhou walked over. By what you carry on your shoulders now, I doubt you'll have the leisure for it." Song Duan snapped off a blade of grass and held it in his teeth, and said idly, "Why not let me help you?"

Zhuo Siheng turned his head to look at him, and found the young Master Song with his eyes shut and the flush of drink still on his face, and could not tell whether it was a true word or a drunken one.

Song Yunhe had begged Zhuo Siheng before to urge his nephew to some honest calling. This young Master Song was the great grief of their house, the cleverest, most book-hungry child of them all as a boy, who yet would not read, and lived as idle a life as he could, and now at twenty would not even marry, loafing about everywhere. Song Yunhe had spoken of it with helpless, earnest feeling. "...I don't even ask that Lord Zhuo turn him to the examinations. We've given up hope of that now. If you could only get the boy to look at an account-book and learn a little of real business, our house would be grateful to you past telling..."

A tour to write a book should count as an honest calling, surely?

Zhuo Siheng did not know just what the Song house held to be honest work, but to his own mind, to make this gazetteer of Jinzhou's ways and things was good not only for the place but for a name handed down to later ages, no idle do-nothing's pastime by any measure.

"To leave a book for this land, a record of its ways and their passing down, is a good thing, but a thing that costs much care. My sister has been a year and more at her compiling in the capital, and has only three or four of the lives done, with much source still to work through, and the first draft perhaps three years in the making. That you have the thought, Yuanda, is good, but it wants resolve and patience no less." Zhuo Siheng sensed Song Duan was not joking, and the whole way's talk had warmed him to the young man, for who does not like a frank, clever soul? But there was always something in Song Duan he could not get to the bottom of, and he was not one to judge a man lightly, so he laid his thought out plain first.

"Are you afraid it's only a passing whim of mine, Brother Zhuo?" Song Duan opened his eyes and looked over with a smile.

"If it could truly be made a thing to enjoy, that would be the best of all." Zhuo Siheng drew a deep breath and leaned back against the trunk, and shut his own eyes instead. "Office and trade both have their weary hours of retiring and resting, but a thing one truly loves can be kept up a whole life long, held to without end. If you, Yuanda, could take the compiling for a pleasure and a sport, then I'd gladly try my hand at this book with you."

Song Duan looked at Zhuo Siheng a while in some surprise, then bent his head and smiled. "You truly are unlike other men, Brother Zhuo."

"I'll take that for praise, then."

"You stand out from the flock, Brother Zhuo, but you must have heard too that the tree taller than the wood is the one the wind breaks."

Zhuo Siheng opened his eyes and looked at him. "You've something to tell me?"

In truth, from a boy there had been few at Song Duan's side who could keep up with the leaps of his talk, and Zhuo Siheng was the exception among exceptions, who not only kept up but could run a step ahead. His heart stirred a little, and his tone and his face turned grave, and he told of the letter from his father that had reached him before he set out. "My house has traded these many lifetimes, but to make money flow in, one can't help casting an eye toward the court. The bad blood between you and the Wanyang Tang, Brother Zhuo, my house is not ignorant of it. A few days ago Prefect Wang Botang went to see my father."

Zhuo Siheng showed not the least surprise. Since he'd dealt with Cui Lu, Wang Botang had made no open move, yet the word that came from Huiheng and from Lord Zeng had his shadow all through it. The crag kiln's own official kiln, which should have been built and firing by year's end, had been held up by a single memorial from Jinzhou, saying that a late-summer, early-autumn storm-tide had left the prefecture short of hands for mending the dikes, and that to enlarge a kiln for tribute at such a time went against the people's good, and begging the emperor to weigh it with great care.

But Zhuo Siheng had been ready long before. When the summer plowing was done, he'd put the slack-season labor-service to it and enlarged the works, building three more of the bun-shaped kilns that Wu Xing had improved, and then sent up a memorial saying that to keep things simple he need only wall off a new yard for the official kiln, with men sent from the court to manage it, and no further toil of the people, so that the storm-tide's harm need not fall on the farming season. An official kiln here, he wrote, was a good to the place, and no mere indulgence of the emperor's pleasure. With an official kiln, trade would flow and the people's means grow full, which was itself a guarding against the storm-tide and a laying-up of wealth among the people.

The emperor read his memorial and praised it without stint, saying only that if every local officer could foresee a thing and have his hand ready beforehand, a good many troubles need not pile into standing abuses and come to the court for rescue at the last.

So the crag kiln's official kiln was set up without a hitch, and no more voice was raised against it.

But Zhuo Siheng knew the one who'd blocked it had not spoken for the people's good at all.

Hearing Song Duan's warning now, he understood well enough why Wang Botang would wish to drive a wedge between him and the Song house.

"My father was most courteous. My house has a great deal of trade in Jinzhou, and this Prefect Wang he dares not offend. But we traders care most how to profit, and the good my father has already had from you, and the gain sure to come, he sees clear as day, so how would he be moved by one man's words? So he gently declined the fine offer Prefect Wang made him, to take charge of the Dongmu Mountain white-tea tribute garden." Song Duan dropped his voice.

For all he was ready for it, Zhuo Siheng was startled.

A good many of Jinzhou's own officials had a stake in the Dongmu white-tea gardens, and that Wang Botang could reckon it all out and then put such an offer to Song's father showed real planning and a real hand. Only, Song's father too knew the murk of those gardens, and did not let a vast profit blind him, which showed a man of far sight as well.

"My father bade me warn you. That they'd lay out so much to vie with you shows they've a move held back." Song Duan said it, and then his old idle, easy smile came back, and he stretched. "After all, my house and you, Brother Zhuo, are in one boat now. If we'd ride the wind and break the waves, we must be of one heart. And to move with the current and ride the swell is no less needed. The wildest waves are where the hardest winds blow, and who's to say they won't send us a good stretch faster under sail?"

"I understand. Thank your father for me, and thank you for the frank warning." Zhuo Siheng had his own thought already, only there were other things before him to do. At least in his first three-year term he would stand on solid ground and do first the needful things that must be done, and the clearing-away of the small vermin was a thing done in passing, not worth setting aside a special time to deal with.

---

The capital. The Zeng residence.

"The emperor truly has this in mind?"

Composed as Zhuo Huiheng always was, she could not help one hand gripping tight at the front of her robe, the white of her knuckles showing clear.

Zeng Xuandu sighed, a knot of trouble between his brows that would not clear. "This year's spring-exam scandal in Jinzhou truly enraged the emperor. He's dealt with a batch of officials, and left a good many posts empty in Jinzhou. Now Wang Botang proposes to move the commandery officers up to the prefecture, and names your brother to go, with a scorpion's sting in his heart."

"Just so! My brother is a year short of his term, and with so fine a name and so splendid a record he might well be promoted back to the capital after. To send him up to the prefecture now, is it not to keep him another term in the provinces, under the Tang house's very eye? And what has the prefecture's education office to do with him? Even if he did go up to a prefecture post next year, by the usual course he should begin as administrator of the prefecture. How is he to be jumped to Education Intendant of a whole prefecture? And more, with my brother's nature, there is work in Anhua still unfinished, and he would never leave it half-done!" Huiheng too could speak thus urgently at times. Her brows knit hard, and though her thought was not yet full-formed she laid it all before her teacher. "If they've already laid their plan, then let my brother hold both posts at once under one commission. The Education Intendancy is the quieter office, true, but it's a plum post all the same. I don't believe no one else has an eye on these places, or that the Ministry of Personnel will leave them standing empty. Every man has his own designs, and a little delay, and even the Tang house can't hold down everyone's hungry looks."

Zeng Xuandu nodded when he'd heard. "That is the way of it. Write first and tell Yunshan, so he knows of it. For the state's sake and my own, I'll not let the Tang house have its way so."

At her teacher's words Zhuo Huiheng was easier at last, and nodded. She saw Zeng Xuandu looking at her, and in the eyes he'd opened at last there was comfort and admiration, and a trace of regret too.

"If only you could stand in the court and lend Yunshan a hand, he would not be so friendless and alone... Well, each has their own road to walk, and you have yours..."

Her teacher's sigh came slow and thin. Zhuo Huiheng stood and heard it, and showed instead a settled smile.

Had she been the girl of a few years back, she would surely have grieved to hear it. But she was not what she had been, and after a moment's thought she said with a smile, "Teacher, even standing nowhere near the heights of the court, as a woman I can still lend my brother my strength, and stand or fall with him."