Agarwood Six Records · Volume Four: Eastward Crossing and Westward Journey

Agarwood Six Records · Volume Four: Eastward Crossing and Westward Journey

One · [Modern · Nara · the Shosoin]

When Liu Zhiqiang stepped off the plane, it was raining in Nara.

Wang Wanshu walked half a step ahead of him, a stack of printouts clutched in her hand. This trip had come about through her: between the Palace Museum and the Nara National Museum there was an exchange research project on "Song-Yuan Painting and the Culture of Incense." She had applied for the topic and added Liu Zhiqiang to the accompanying list under the name of "inheritor of the folk incense trade."

"We only have forty minutes," she said. "The Shosoin's 'special viewing' happens once a year, and only a few pieces are shown each time. This year the Ranjatai is among them. This is the longest window I could get." "Enough," Liu Zhiqiang said.

He took the jade out from inside his jacket. Half a piece, six petals, three characters carved on its inner face — Ranjatai. He had flown it three thousand kilometers, only to bring it a little closer to that agarwood.

The exhibition hall was dark. The lights fell only on the display case.

Inside the case lay an enormous piece of agarwood. A hundred and fifty-six centimeters — longer than a man's outstretched arm — the color of aged ivory, spiral whorls of varying depth across its surface, and several clear cut marks: the parts people had taken away, cut by cut, over the centuries. Ashikaga Yoshimitsu had cut from it; Oda Nobunaga had cut from it; the Meiji Emperor had cut from it too.

Ranjatai. The finest incense under heaven.

Liu Zhiqiang stopped in front of the glass.

He smelled it.

Not one scent, but six.

Pine needles after rain, the pages of old books — this was its own aroma: composed and clean, like a book turned through for many years. But beneath that layer of scent there lay other things: the astringency of moss and unripe fruit; the rank tang of sandalwood mixed with iron rust; sea salt and sun-dried tangerine peel; the scorched smell of smoked hide; the water of melting ice, almost without scent.

Six. All six were inside.

Liu Zhiqiang pressed the jade in his palm against the glass.

Inside the case, the aroma of the great agarwood suddenly leaned aside.

It was as if someone had plucked, half a degree, a string long pulled taut.

Wang Wanshu stood beside him, holding her breath. She looked down at that line on her printout — a photocopy of the surviving fragment of the Register of the Six Incenses held in Japan; she had compared it in the Palace Museum's vault three times before she dared to confirm it: Ranjatai is not one of the six; by Ranjatai, the six are verified.

"It is not one of the six incenses," Liu Zhiqiang said.

"I know." Wang Wanshu's voice was very soft. "But what is it?" "It is the thing that 'verifies.'" Liu Zhiqiang's eyes stayed on the agarwood in the case. "The six incenses cannot recognize one another — only when they come near it do they light up. It is..." He searched a long time before he found the word.

"It is the yardstick." Behind him, someone clapped three times. The applause was soft, very slow.

"Mr. Liu." Liu Zhiqiang turned. Liu Shengjingma stood in the dim of the exhibition hall, in a dark gray suit, his cuffs impeccably clean, a slender wooden cane with a nine-petal chrysanthemum pattern in his hand.

"I knew you would come," Liu Shengjingma said. "Your father came here first, all those years ago." Liu Zhiqiang's heart sank.

"My father?" "In 2000, autumn." Liu Shengjingma spoke slowly. "He changed trains at Kyoto and came on to Nara, and stood in this hall for a very long time. I was young then, standing three paces behind him. He asked me one question." "What question?" "He asked: 'If all six pieces were found, would there be no more war?'" Liu Shengjingma paused. "I answered him then. He would not accept it. That winter, he never appeared again." Liu Zhiqiang's fingers tightened. The year 2000, the gengchen year, autumn. The blood ledger read: not returned. No accident.

"Where is he?" Liu Zhiqiang asked.

Liu Shengjingma did not answer the question. He walked to the case and stood shoulder to shoulder with Liu Zhiqiang; the two men's shadows overlapped on the same pane of glass.

"Mr. Liu, you have seen it," Liu Shengjingma said. "Then you have seen it too — your ancestors were wrong." "Wrong how?" "Wrong to separate the yardstick from the lock." Liu Shengjingma spoke slowly, every word set down with care. "Shennong left six pieces of agarwood, and he left this mother agarwood as well. What is the mother agarwood for? It is for verification, for opening, for joining the six pieces back into one whole. Your ancestors treated it as the 'thing that must not be touched,' and treated the six pieces as the 'things that must stay scattered' — and so for a thousand years we have had the yardstick in hand and never measured with it; had the lock, and never opened it." "And if it were opened?" "The world would no longer hurt." Liu Shengjingma turned his head to look at him. The hall was dark; his face was half lit, half in shadow.

"Mr. Liu, my sister died in Kosovo, at nineteen. When she went, her suitcase was packed with bandages and antibiotics. When she died, she was exactly like the people she had gone to save — no Japanese, no Serbs. People were originally one and the same thing; it was memory that divided them." He paused.

"What has your family guarded for a thousand years? Memory. Keeping people remembering where they are from, whom they have hated, who has hated them. Is that not another kind of cruelty?" Liu Zhiqiang did not argue back at once.

He stood there, looking through the glass at the piece of agarwood that had been cut away for a thousand years, and suddenly understood where Liu Shengjingma was most terrifying — every sentence this man spoke was true.

"Mr. Liu Shengjingma," he said, "I have only one question." "Please." "If the six incenses were gathered and lit, and the world of men had no more differences, no more memory —" Liu Zhiqiang looked at him. "Then what of your sister?" Liu Shengjingma was silent for a long time.

The hall's lights fell on the great agarwood, cut mark after cut mark, like growth rings.

"...She would be gone as well," Liu Shengjingma said at last. His voice, for the first time, was not slow.

"Exactly," Liu Zhiqiang said. "You want to end war, and the price is that she never existed at all. The people you want to save, and your reason for saving her — gone together." Liu Shengjingma looked at him.

After a long while, he bowed slightly — a perfectly formal, Japanese bow.

"Mr. Liu," he said. "We will speak again." He turned and walked away. At the door of the hall he stopped again, and said without turning: "Your father would not listen, back then. And you — will you not listen either?" The sound of his footsteps receded.

Wang Wanshu stood at Liu Zhiqiang's side and had not spoken the whole time. Only now did she open her mouth, her voice a little dry: "He believes he is saving people." "Mm." "His reasoning — I cannot refute it." "Nor can I," Liu Zhiqiang said. "So I did not refute his reasoning. I asked him about his sister."

Two · [Northern Song · the Third Year of the Yuanfu Era (1100) · Changzhou · Winter]

The winter the boat reached Changzhou, Su Dongpo was already sixty-four years old, and ill.

He had traveled north from Danzhou, on the road for the better part of a year. Across the sea, over the ridges, downstream along the river; old friends waited for him along the way. All those he could see, he saw; those he could not, he sent word to through others. Some urged him to go no farther, to settle in Changzhou, and he said, "Very well."

Liu Jiulang arrived in early November.

He was forty-seven, half his hair white, having come south all the way from Bianliang — thirty-nine days on the road. When he arrived, Dongpo was leaning against the couch; a brazier of charcoal burned in the room, and beside it a small incense burner was warming.

"Jiulang." Dongpo smiled. "If your father were still alive, he would have to scold me — I have summoned his son from Bianliang to Changzhou." "The Scholar has words to speak," Liu Jiulang said, settling to his knees. "My father said on his deathbed as well: if the Scholar asks, the Liu family must come, a thousand li or not." Dongpo looked at him for a long time.

"All my life," he said, "exiled to Huangzhou, exiled to Huizhou, exiled to Danzhou — exiled here, exiled there. The agarwood in your shop, though, has never changed." "The incense does not change," Liu Jiulang said. "People change." "True." Dongpo smiled, then broke into a fit of coughing. When the coughing subsided, he took a cloth bundle from beside his pillow and opened it: inside was half a piece of jade.

Round, six petals, the broken edge jagged.

Liu Jiulang's breath stopped — the other half in his home lay, at this moment, in the hidden compartment in Bianliang.

"This half is called the 'Record,'" Dongpo said. "The half in your family is called the 'Guard.' The guard's half passes down through the generations to the eldest son; the record's half is entrusted through the generations to people who can be trusted. In my generation, it was entrusted to me — more than twenty years." "Scholar —" "I am sixty-four." Dongpo placed the jade in Liu Jiulang's palm. "I am giving it back to you." Liu Jiulang cupped it in both hands; his hands were trembling.

"Scholar, if the two halves were in one place —" "They cannot be in one place." Dongpo cut him off.

He braced himself against the couch and sat a little straighter, word by word: "The guard in one place, the record in one place. Do not let the two be joined into a single piece." "Then to whom shall I give this Record half?" Dongpo thought for a moment and said: "To the people on your wife's mother's side." "The Wang family?" "The Wangs know a hundred herbs," Dongpo said. "Those who know a hundred herbs know what should be placed together, and what will die if placed together. This half, the Wangs can guard it." Liu Jiulang lowered his head to look at the half piece of jade in his palm. The jade was cool; at the broken edge ran a hairline crack, one that should have met the break of the half at home seamlessly.

"Scholar," he asked, "why must they be divided?" Dongpo did not answer at once. He reached out and stirred the charcoal, and the scent of the small incense burner in the room shifted with it.

"Jiulang, when I was young I wrote a line: 'This incense is like an old friend. I was exiled and exiled again; it, on the other hand, never changed one bit.'" He spoke slowly. "Only later did I come to understand — the incense does not change, because it does not remember. If people do not remember, they do not hurt; but if people do not remember, they cease to be human." He repeated the phrase he had said for so many years: "Where the incense stays, the family stays." "If the family is here, one must remember. To remember is to hurt. To hurt is a person's duty." Liu Jiulang put the jade back inside his garment and performed three kowtows.

In the seventh month of the following year, Su Dongpo died in Changzhou.

That half called the Record, Liu Jiulang carried back to Bianliang. He did not place it with the Guard — he gave it to his wife, née Wang, and she sewed it into a sachet and hung it behind the door of the incense cellar in the rear hall, where it hung for twenty-six years.

By the year of Jingkang, Lady Wang was gone. When Liu Cheng crossed south, he took only that sachet from behind the cellar door.

Three · [Modern · Rome · the Vatican]

Mr. Bai was waiting for him at the door of the archives room.

About fifty, wearing a suit washed pale, his hair combed neatly, a kraft paper bag in his hand. He saw Liu Zhiqiang, smiled first, and put out his hand: "Mr. Liu. My surname is Bai. People have called me 'Mr. Bai' for twenty years; my own name, no one calls anymore." "Mr. Bai." "Come in." Mr. Bai swiped his card and pushed open the thick door. "I have worked here for twenty-two years. Twenty-two years, I have been searching for China in other people's archives." The archives room was very deep. On both sides, shelves rose higher than the eye could follow; the air smelled of old paper, mildew, and wax. Mr. Bai walked quickly, his footfalls knocking echoes on the stone floor.

"The thing you are looking for is not in the Vatican's collection catalogue," he said as he walked. "It is in the seams of the catalogue." He stopped before a shelf and drew out a codex. A parchment cover, no title. He opened it: Latin, dense and small.

"This is a medieval manuscript of 'A Record of Eastern Wonders.' The author is unknown — perhaps some monk who never made it back to Europe, or perhaps it was pieced together by several hands." Mr. Bai turned to a page in the middle and pointed it out to Liu Zhiqiang. "Here." Beneath that line of Latin, in extremely small characters, was written a line of Chinese.

The Chinese was crooked, as if written by a hand unused to the brush: Three grains of white agarwood, entrusted to one who can guard them. A monk carries them southeast, to the land of lions.

"Three grains of white agarwood," Liu Zhiqiang read once. "The White Ranjatai." "Correct," Mr. Bai said. "It reached the Vatican. In the Vatican's accession records, only one line was entered: 'Incense from the East, three grains, without scent, холодный' — cold." He paused. "And then nothing more. Because one man carried it away." "A Chinese monk." "The record says only 'an Eastern monk.'" Mr. Bai closed the codex. "Destination: the southeast — a continent where lions roam." "East Africa." "East Africa." Mr. Bai nodded. "The Swahili Coast region. The Lamu Archipelago, or farther south." Liu Zhiqiang stood before that row of shelves rising beyond sight, and suddenly felt a touch of dizziness. Six pieces of agarwood, scattered across six continents — Japan, the Middle East, the Americas, the South Seas, the Capital, and now East Africa as well. For a thousand years, someone had carried them, one by one, to the farthest corners of the earth.

"Why?" he asked.

Mr. Bai looked at him.

"Mr. Liu, for twenty-two years I have been searching for China in other people's archives," he said slowly. "I found a rule: whatever is carried farthest is always that which should least be found." He drew out the photocopied page of the codex and handed it to Liu Zhiqiang. "This is for you. The original cannot leave the room." "Thank you." "No need to thank me," Mr. Bai smiled, a trace of self-mockery in the smile. "All my life I have kept other people's stories for other people. This time, I want to see which home that agarwood will return to."

Four · [Modern · the Capital]

The day Liu Zhiqiang returned, Wang Wanshu was waiting for him in the shop.

She sat on the high stool by the counter, three things spread before her: her dark blue cloth notebook, a tablet, and a printed email.

"I have to tell you something first," she said. "I will give the evidence first, then the conclusion." "Go on." "In March of this year, I submitted the scan data of the scroll structure of 'Along the River During the Qingming Festival' to an international collaborative project — 'Joint Overseas Research on the Mounting Formats of Song Painting,' hosted by a foundation registered in Switzerland. The paperwork was complete, and three teachers I respect sat on the academic committee." She paused.

"Last month the foundation published its interim findings, one of them a paper titled 'Locating the Hidden Compartments in Northern Song Silk Scrolls: Deduction and Case Studies.'" Liu Zhiqiang stood without moving.

"When I gave them the data," Wang Wanshu said, "I didn't know about the hidden compartment. That was something you told me only later." "I know." "But I gave them every datum needed to locate the hidden compartment." Wang Wanshu raised her head. "Latitude and longitude, silk-layer thickness, the inner-diameter tolerance of the roller ends. The position they deduced matches the brushstroke in the painting reading 'shang se chen tan' to within two millimeters." The shop was very quiet.

"That foundation," Wang Wanshu said, "donated a sum for underwater archaeology to the Quanzhou Maritime Museum last month. That same week, excavation began on the second hold of the Song-dynasty shipwreck in Quanzhou Bay." Liu Zhiqiang walked over and looked at the email. In the sender field was an institutional address; at the signature was a small emblem — a nine-petal chrysanthemum.

"I think," Wang Wanshu said, her voice beginning to tremble, "I helped the bad men." She lowered her head.

"Liu Zhiqiang, what I have feared most for half my life is losing control. I investigate every matter to the bottom; I thought that way nothing would go wrong. But this time, what went wrong was me." Liu Zhiqiang looked at her.

"I don't know," she said.

Those three words, coming from her lips, weighed more than any sentence.

Liu Zhiqiang did not comfort her. He walked behind the counter, spread out the photocopied page he had brought back from Rome, and pressed it under the glass.

The white agarwood was in East Africa.

Half the purple agarwood was in a southern-ocean shipwreck, half in the roller of that painting at the Palace Museum.

The yellow agarwood had gone with that ship.

The black agarwood was in the Americas.

The green agarwood was in the Middle East.

Ranjatai — the yardstick — was in Japan, in their hands.

He ran through the six pieces in his mind and suddenly realized one thing: what the Jiiju line had pursued for a thousand years was never the six pieces of agarwood. What they pursued was to make the six pieces appear once more in one and the same place. And to do that, they did not need to seize them — they needed only to keep the world in turmoil.

In turmoil, those who guard cannot guard.

"Wang Wanshu," he said.

"Mm." "Forward that email to me. And all the materials on that foundation." "What are you going to do?" Liu Zhiqiang took the half piece of jade from inside his garment and set it on the counter. The six-petal pattern on the jade was very clear under the lamp.

"They want all six in one city," he said. "Then I have to scatter the remaining pieces once more, before they finish gathering them." Wang Wanshu looked at him.

"You alone?" "Not alone," Liu Zhiqiang said. "I have my brother Ye." He picked up his phone and sent Wen Ye a message. Three minutes later, Wen Ye replied with two words: "Tell me when you're there."

Outside the window, the night of the Capital pressed down. Liu Zhiqiang put away the photocopied page of 'A Record of Eastern Wonders' and, together with the blood ledger and the half piece of jade, tucked it back into the hidden compartment behind the plaque.

He turned off the light and locked the door.

In the hutong, someone was walking a dog; the bell on its collar rang once, very far away.

— Volume Four, to be continued · next: Volume Five, "Six-Colored Flames"

> 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.