The Six Records of Agarwood — Side Story I: The Fir-Core

The Six Records of Agarwood — side story, part one

I. Biaobei Lane

The first rain of autumn fell on Biaobei Lane. Liu Zhiqiang had taken down half the shop boards of the Chen-Tan shop; damp air rushed in, and the smell of aged timber overpowered the smoke of the coal stoves in the street. Wang Guanshu was tallying accounts in the inner room; the abacus beads clicked sparsely.

The visitor was a painting-mounter named Ji, around sixty, in a washed-pale blue cloth gown, holding a square oil-paper parcel to his breast. He stood outside the threshold a while, scraped his shoe soles clean on the stone step, then entered.

"Shopkeeper Liu. This painting has been in my hands three years; the owner never came for it, and the address left was this lane, but the house number doesn't match." Master Ji set the parcel on the counter. "I asked half the street; they said this shop is surnamed Liu, and hasn't moved in generations."

Liu Zhiqiang unwrapped it. It was an old painting, on silk, the heart of it darkened, corners worm-eaten. It depicted a fir tree, in a rough, sparse hand — not the work of a master. Only two characters remained of the inscription, blurred beyond recognition by water.

"What was the owner's surname?"

"Not the full name — only that it was Wen."

The abacus in the inner room stopped. Wang Guanshu came out, stood half a step behind and to the side of Liu Zhiqiang, looked down at the painting, and said nothing.

Master Ji said, "There is a hidden layer behind the painting's heart. I lifted a corner of it; the lining inside is old paper, and I dared not move further. This kind of old silk, once you lift it, it falls apart. If you know the owner, best say so to their face."

II. The Hidden Layer

After Master Ji left, the shop stayed quiet a long while.

Wang Guanshu laid the painting flat on the table and fetched a bamboo spatula, tweezers, and a basin of warm water. Her hands were very steady; the skill of remounting she had learned from her father. Liu Zhiqiang held the lamp beside her, the wick turned very low, the light falling only on a patch an inch square of the painting's heart.

"The backing paper is Song paper," she said. "Fine laid lines — it's bamboo paper. Not of this painting's era."

"The painting is Ming."

"The painting is Ming, the backing is Song. Someone placed Song paper beneath the Ming painting, then remounted it."

She worked the bamboo spatula in from a corner, separating inch by inch. The old paste had gone brittle and fell like crushed snow. At the third layer, sure enough, there was paper in the hidden layer, folded in four, its color yellow gone brown, its edges seized by paste.

Unfolded, it was a page of a manual. Vertical columns, ink-written, the frame-rulings drawn by hand, uneven. Three characters at the head: "The Six-Incense Manual."

Liu Zhiqiang's fingers halted at the paper's edge, not touching.

The manual listed six scents: Lan, Lv, Zi, Hei, Huang, Bai She Dai. Beneath each was small writing — origin, flame-color, method of discernment. The hand was lean, the trailing strokes drawn long, in the manner of Huang Tingjian.

After the six scents, there was another line. That line had been painted over with heavy ink, very thick, darker than the main text, as if by a later hand. Seen sideways under the lamp, beneath the ink layer showed the ridge of a stroke — faintly the upper half of the character "same" (tong).

"The seventh scent," Wang Guanshu said.

"The one who inked it did not want it seen."

"Inked so thick — he feared others seeing, and feared forgetting it himself." She turned the paper over; in the blank space on the back was a line of small characters, written extremely faintly, as if jotted with a blunted brush dipped in pale ink:

If you see the seventh scent, go ask the one who painted it.

III. The Northern Song · The Night of Copying the Manual

The Yuanyou years, Bianliang.

That night, two lamps burned in the back hall of the Liu family's Chen-Tan shop. Huang Tingjian sat at the desk copying the manual; the Liu ancestor ground ink opposite him. The draft was jointly bound by the two families; the six scents were already recorded, but the Liu ancestor had pulled away the page of the seventh scent and pressed it under the inkstone at the desk's corner.

"Why not record it?" Huang Tingjian asked.

"The manual must not be complete," the Liu ancestor said. "The six scents are the manual of divided keeping. Made whole, it becomes a chart of gathered incense. If later generations follow the complete manual to search, sooner or later they will search to one place."

Huang Tingjian's brush hung above the paper, hanging a long while. A drop of ink gathered at the tip, about to fall and not falling. In the end he set the brush down, and wrote nothing.

"Lan She Dai is the mother incense; I judged that clearly," he said. "The six scents in divided keeping, I wrote that clearly too. Only this seventh scent... if you do not record it, later generations will not know it exists."

"Not knowing is better than knowing."

"Not knowing, someone will invent a name for it." Huang Tingjian looked at the page beneath the inkstone. "An invented name is harder to guard against than the true name."

The Liu ancestor did not answer. He moved the inkstone aside, drew out that page, and burned it in the lamplight. When the flame rose, Huang Tingjian reached out and snatched a corner from the fire's edge — on it remained only half a character.

He folded that half-corner and tucked it into his sleeve.

"I will not write it," he said. "But I leave a lead. If someday someone meets the seventh scent, there must be somewhere to ask."

IV. The Half-Character

The modern day. The lamp still burned.

Liu Zhiqiang held the fragment of the manual to the light. The heavy ink over the seventh-scent line showed layers in the light: beneath was the original ink, then another layer over it; the one who over-inked pressed hard, and at the stroke's end there was a pause-dot, as if he had stopped after writing.

"This ink is not Song ink," Wang Guanshu said. "It has gone gray — it is later. Applied by someone of the Ming or Qing."

"The one who inked it had seen this page of the manual."

"Seen it, and wanted it gone. But he did not burn it." She laid the fragment flat. "If he burned it, it would be gone. He inked it — which means what he feared was not the page, but the page being understood by someone."

Liu Zhiqiang read the small characters on the back. "The one who painted it," he repeated. "The one who painted this fir tree."

"The painting is Ming, the backing is Song, the manual is Song, the ink is later," Wang Guanshu ran through the order. "Three eras of hands, pressed onto one sheet of paper. The earliest who left the manual, the mounter in between, the inker last."

"The mounter placed Song paper beneath the Ming painting on purpose — meant to leave it."

"He hid the manual in the painting, then sent the painting into this lane." She paused. "He knew the Liu family was still here."

Outside, the rain eased. A bicycle bell rang once in the lane, then faded.

Liu Zhiqiang put the fragment of the manual into a brocade case, lining the bottom with a sliver of fir wood — old stock kept in the shop. As he closed the case, he caught a whiff of an extremely faint scent, not of agarwood or sandalwood, but the smell of the fir-core itself: dry, astringent, like an old paper archive.

"Tomorrow I'll look into the painting's provenance," he said. "The owner surnamed Wen — does Master Ji have any other leads."

"I'll go," Wang Guanshu said. "I know the mounting trade. You go to the cultural relics bureau and file the fragment. Wen Ye, too, should be told."

Liu Zhiqiang nodded. He closed the shop door, slid the bolt, and looked back once at the fir-tree painting on the table. The fir in the painting was drawn crudely; on its trunk was a break-mark, as if struck by lightning, or as if carved by a knife.

The break-mark's position lined up exactly with where the seventh scent lay on the manual in the hidden layer.

— "The Six Records of Agarwood," Side Story I, complete · continues in Side Story II