Agarwood Six Records · Volume One: The Agarwood Affairs of Bianliang

Agarwood Six Records · Volume One: The Agarwood Affairs of Bianliang

A Dual-Timeline Opening

One · [Modern · the Capital]

"How come your seal is only half?" The woman put the question with no thought of waiting for an answer. She only pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, lowered her head again over the aromatic materials on the counter, and studied them as if she were browsing an ordinary shop.

The hand with which Liu Zhiqiang gripped the jade had begun to sweat.

"You are—" "The Painting and Calligraphy Department of the Palace Museum. Wang Wanshu." At last she raised her head. "I'm working on the digitization of 'Along the River During the Qingming Festival'." From her bag she took a notebook, dark blue cloth-bound, its corners frayed soft, turned to the page where a slip of paper was tucked, and pushed it in front of him.

On the paper was the rubbing of a seal impression. Round, with six petals.

Liu Zhiqiang laid the jade from his palm onto it.

Crack to crack, vein to vein—the missing half grew exactly within the seal impression on the paper. Like a man who had finally found the missing piece of his own puzzle.

"This is—" "My father left it." Wang Wanshu said. "He was a painting-and-calligraphy restorer at the Palace Museum, fifteen years ago. He once restored a damaged Song painting and found this paper between its layers. He told no one; he wrote it only in our old account ledger—'The six-petaled seal: ask no questions.'" She paused.

"I've studied dead things my whole life, and all I want is to know what this seal really is. Last month I found that in one of the Capital's hutongs there is a shop called 'Shangse Chetan,' still using a Northern Song shop name. So I came." Liu Zhiqiang looked at the reassembled seal for a long moment, then said: "Then the other half is here with you." "Not all of it." Wang Wanshu shook her head. "My father's paper has only the impression, no characters. On your jade, there are characters." He turned it over and showed her the three extremely faint characters on its inner face.

Ranjatai.

Wang Wanshu read them once and frowned. "Ranjatai... I know the name. The Shosoin in Japan—the finest incense under heaven. But that is a piece of incense, not—" "Not a seal." Liu Zhiqiang took her up. "I know it's a piece of incense too. But it's carved on a seal." Neither of them spoke again.

Outside the window, the standing water in the alley was slowly receding; the sky was still overcast. Liu Zhiqiang set the jade and the paper side by side on the counter, and suddenly felt that what he had kept watch over these six years was not a shop but a chest he had never opened—and now someone had handed him the chest's other key.

"Your father," Wang Wanshu asked suddenly, "why did he never tell you these things?" "He never had the chance." Liu Zhiqiang said. "The year I turned twelve, he went on a 'business trip' and never came back. My mother said he'd had an accident." "Do you believe it?" He thought for a moment. "My mother believed it. So I believed it for twenty-three years." Wang Wanshu asked nothing further. She put the notebook away and took a tablet from her bag, tapping open a high-definition image.

"Look at this." On the screen was an enlarged section of "Along the River During the Qingming Festival": a wooden bridge, and at its eastern end a press of shops, one of them with a very small shopfront and a plaque hung above it. She spread her fingers on the screen, magnifying the image to its limit; only then did the characters on the plaque become barely legible—Shangse Chetan.

Liu Zhiqiang stared at those four characters; a tendon in his back suddenly pulled taut.

"The original plaque in my shop," he said, "has a line carved on its back—the sweep of the left-falling stroke in the character 色 (se, 'color')." He ran inside, carried out from the workroom the blank stock with no characters cut into it, turned it over to its reverse, and held it against the tablet's light.

Two lines, laid one atop the other.

Exactly the same.

Wang Wanshu drew a breath. Ten years in the trade, she had seen too many "coincidences"—but the match of this single stroke was not something coincidence could explain. It was a signal left by a human hand, crossing more than nine hundred years, pointing to the same shop and the same person.

"Your ancestor," she said softly, "left himself a line of address inside this painting."

Two · [Northern Song · Bianliang · Spring of the Third Year of the Yuanfeng Era]

Spring in Dongjing Bianliang began with the willow catkins.

White catkins drifted over the whole city on the Bian River, falling into the tile seams of the old and new city gates, onto the stalls of the Zhou Bridge night market, and onto the threshold of the little shop east of the bridge. The shop was not large; its wooden plaque, black with gold characters, read "the Liu family's Agarwood & Sandalwood Shop"—and it was cut from the very same piece of wood as the plaque nine hundred years later.

In the shop sat a young man surnamed Liu, ninth in his generation, whom the neighbors called Liu Jiulang. He was cutting a piece of agarwood into thin flakes, his knife hand steady—a craft the Liu family had handed down for more than ten generations.

Two others lived behind the shop. His wife, Wang Shi, came from a medicine-merchant family in Dongjing; she knew a hundred herbs, and she kept the agarwood cellar in the back chamber, every precious material sealed into its jars through her hands. Then there was a young apprentice surnamed Wen, named An, fifteen or sixteen, clever and sweet-mouthed—good at running errands, at keeping the books, at serving tea; Liu Jiulang had picked him up from among the street orphans and raised him. Just now Wen An was squatting on the threshold stripping bark from aromatic wood; hearing someone cough, he glanced up, then bent back to his work.

Outside the door, someone coughed.

The one who came in was a big, stout monk, bald-headed, his monk's robe hanging open, a short staff at his waist that may or may not have been a Zen staff. The moment he stepped in he drew a deep breath, and his eyes lit up.

"Fine fragrance." The monk said. "Ziyouge?" Liu Jiulang looked up. "A keen eye, brother. Ziyouge from Hainan—it only arrived this morning." "Lu Zhishen." The monk thumped his chest. "Of the Daxiangguo Temple. My master says that in the city of Dongjing, if you would judge incense you must go to the Liu family. Today I've come to learn." Even as he said "learn," his hand had already slipped a flake down; he put it in his mouth, chewed, and savored it with narrowed eyes.

Liu Jiulang laughed. "Brother Lu, incense is smelled, not eaten." "All the same." Lu Zhishen was grave. "Only once it enters the mouth do you know the root." This monk had come to Bianliang a few years back, a man of Yan'an Prefecture, and now he was lodging at the Daxiangguo Temple; they called it leaving the world, but it was more like finding a place to set his foot. The Liu family had long had dealings with the temple—the incense of the Daxiangguo Temple had always been supplied by the Liu family. So when Lu Zhishen came, on its face it was to learn, but in truth it was to stand guard: in the back courtyard of the Liu family's Agarwood & Sandalwood Shop, a martial monk sat the year through. Such was the rule of the incense hall.

Even as they spoke, the curtain was lifted and in came another.

This time it was a man of letters, lean, with open, clear features, wearing a half-worn blue gown, a folding fan turning in his hand. Nothing was painted on the fan's face; only two characters were written there: "Hehe."

"Su Xueshi." Liu Jiulang and Lu Zhishen rose together.

Su Dongpo waved a hand and walked over to the incense rack by himself, smelled his way around it, and stopped at last before the Ziyouge with a long sigh. "This incense is like an old friend. I've been demoted again and again; it hasn't changed in the least." He was an old patron of the Liu family. Over the years his official fortunes had risen and fallen, yet his visits to the shop had never grown few. Today he had come to collect an incense seal—the Liu family had carved him a "Snow Hall" seal, to go with his sobriquet, the Layman of Snow Hall.

"Jiulang," Dongpo took up the seal and suddenly turned serious, "I have a few words. Remember them." "Please speak, Xueshi." "Where the incense stays, the family stays." He spoke it word by word. "While this shop stands, this incense stands. While this incense stands, some things will not fall into disorder." Liu Jiulang did not quite understand, but he remembered it.

Wang Shi heard from beyond the curtain and brought in a cup of tea, offering it softly: "Take your time, Xueshi." Dongpo accepted it with a smile. "Sister-in-law, this tea of yours is crisper than anything outside." After Dongpo had gone, Lu Zhishen, chewing that flake of incense, suddenly said: "Those words just now—I've heard them." "What?" "When your father was alive, he said the same." Lu Zhishen was rarely grave. "He said the Liu family's incense is not for people to smell; it is for people to remember. I asked him, remember what? He said—remember not to let the six pieces come together into one." The knife in Liu Jiulang's hand stopped.

"Six pieces?" "Six pieces of agarwood." Lu Zhishen spat the flake out and set it on the table. "I don't quite understand it either. Your father said that once you and I are gone, someone will understand soon enough. I reckon that one will have to be a remarkable sort." He laughed a great ha-ha, clapped Liu Jiulang on the shoulder, and went off to sit in the back courtyard again.

Three · [Northern Song · Bianliang · Afternoon of the Same Day]

The one who came in the afternoon was Huang Tingjian.

The Hermit of Shangu came not to buy incense, bringing only a scroll of paper. Wen An had long since ground the ink and was waiting to one side, holding the paper's corner; Huang Tingjian waved him off. "Go on, go. This paper today is not for other eyes." Wen An stuck out his tongue and backed away to squat by the door. Huang Tingjian unrolled the paper on the counter; it was written dense with characters, with some strange symbols drawn here and there.

"The first draft of the Six-Incense Register." He lowered his voice. "Jiulang, lend me a quiet corner of your shop; I'll finish writing the last entry." Liu Jiulang led him to the back hall. Huang Tingjian set down his brush with extreme slowness; every line he wrote, he had to smell the incense at his hand, as if confirming something. When he reached the section on the Purple Ranjatai, he stopped for a very long time.

"Jiulang, do you know where this purple incense will finally come to rest?" "Father said it is hidden in a painting." "Which painting?" "He didn't say. He only said, 'in the painting there is a shop; in the shop there is the answer.'" Huang Tingjian gave an "Mm," took up his brush, and wrote: "Purple enters the painting; the painting hides the city. The city has a shop; the shop has the seal." Finished, he set down the brush and looked at Liu Jiulang. "Remember these words till you die. If someday someone comes to you holding half a seal, show him these sixteen characters." "And if I am not here?" "Then wait for your son." Huang Tingjian smiled. "Your Liu family has thin descendants, but the line carries on in the end. I believe that." After he left, Liu Jiulang copied those sixteen characters onto a slip of paper and pressed it into the hidden compartment beneath the counter.

—He did not know that nine hundred years later, that slip of paper, together with the hidden compartment, would join with his father's cellar vault and the notebook of Wang Wanshu's father, forming one and the same line.

At dusk, the curtain moved again.

The one who came in was a woman in a beizi jacket of lotus-pink, a tiny white jasmine pinned at her temple. Without a word, she set a letter on the counter, tapped the tabletop lightly twice, turned, and walked out.

Liu Jiulang picked up the letter, did not open it, and smelled the envelope.

Moss and unripe fruit.

The color changed in his face.

This was the scent of the Green Ranjatai—and the Green Ranjatai should not have appeared here at all. It should have gone out to the western regions long ago, in Tang times.

He chased out; in the alley there remained only a trace of lotus-pink. It was Li Shishi.

She did not look back, only tossed a sentence from afar: "Someone has been asking about your family's 'six pieces.' I blocked it for you. Next time, I won't be able to." Liu Jiulang held that letter and stood by the Bian River, looking at the whole river's water.

A night wind rose and the willow catkins fell again. He suddenly felt that behind this small incense shop stood many people he could not see—Su Dongpo, Huang Tingjian, Lu Zhishen, Li Shishi, and that one who had never shown his face, the one asking after the "six pieces."

And at that moment, Lu Zhishen in the back courtyard suddenly pushed the door open and came out, his nostrils twitching.

"Jiulang." "Hm?" "That purple incense of yours..." The monk frowned. "It's trembling." Liu Jiulang went back into the shop and looked at the wooden case that held the Ziyouge. The case was perfectly sound, the incense lying perfectly still. Yet when he brought his nose close—an extremely faint, off scent that did not belong to agarwood, as if something, in a place very far away, had answered it once.

One breath, and it scattered.

That was the first "Cry of Incense" of the Liu family's Agarwood & Sandalwood Shop.

No one knew that at that same moment, in a newly built mansion west of the city, an official in a purple robe was reading a letter from a fangshi adept, brought from the Eastern Sea. It held a single sentence, written once in Khitan script and once in Han script: "The chief of the six incenses is already in the eastern land. The rest must be taken amid chaos." The official's surname was Cai, his given name Jing.

When he had finished, he held the letter to the candle flame and burned it. The firelight lit his face, very calm.

Four · [Modern · the Capital · That Night]

Liu Zhiqiang saw Wang Wanshu to the mouth of the alley.

"Tomorrow," she said, "I'll go to the Palace Museum and pull up the original scan of 'Along the River During the Qingming Festival,' and we'll check that stroke. And—could you let me take a rubbing of the line on the back of your plaque?" "As you like." Liu Zhiqiang said. "But there's one thing I should say first—my father's booklet says, 'those who see the whole must leave.' Old Zhou left yesterday. I'm not certain—" "You're afraid something will happen to me?" He said nothing.

Wang Wanshu smiled, not much like a smile: "Liu Zhiqiang, my father was gone fifteen years ago. Half my life I've spent watching from the edge of 'things happening.' I'm not afraid." She left. The alley held him alone again.

He returned to the shop, barred the door, and sat down beneath the small lamp. The jade, Wang Wanshu's paper, his father's booklet—three things laid out in a row.

He opened the booklet and found the line in the middle—those who see the whole must leave.

There was half a sentence beneath it, blurred at the time by water, illegible. He took out his phone's light and shone it sideways, making it out slowly; it was a line his father had written with an extremely light hand: "But to leave is not the same as never coming back." Outside the door, the rain began to fall again.

Beyond the curtain of rain, at the far end of the alley, a black car stopped for a long time. The person inside did not get out; he only looked at the shop lit by its one small lamp, looked for a while, started the engine, and drove off.

Neon swept past the car windows and fell across the man's profile—he was about fifty, in a dark gray suit, his cuffs impeccably clean. Only after the car had gone a long way did he take from inside his coat a small incense chopstick and, over the car's incense burner, burn a flake of incense.

Blue smoke rose; he closed his eyes and smelled it.

Then he said something extremely quiet, as if speaking to someone not present: "Zhiqiang. What your father would not heed back then—will you not heed it either?" The rain came down harder.

The night of the Capital steeped nine hundred years of things in one and the same rain.

— *Agarwood Six Records*, Volume One, to be continued · next: Volume Two, "The Cry of Incense"

> This is an original serialized story from *Agarwood Six Records*; characters and plot are fictional. Common knowledge of agarwood and aromatics herein is compiled from public materials and does not constitute investment or medical advice.