The Six Records of Agarwood — Side Story II: Beginning of Autumn

The Six Records of Agarwood — side story, part two

I. A Grain in the Ash

At the third rain after Beginning of Autumn, the tile-eaves of the old Bianliang shop still dripped. Liu Zhiqiang poured the ash from the six stoves collected on the day of the incense-scattering ritual onto a sheet of plain paper, and teased it gently with a bamboo sliver. The ash was white, fine as flour; at the third stove, the tip of the sliver struck something hard.

He leaned close. An incense-bead, the size of a grain of rice, its skin charred black, yet inside still holding a fleck of yellow. Not fully burnt.

Wang Guanshu came from the inner room, paste on her hands, backing a fragmentary painting. She glanced at the bead and set down her brown brush.

"The stoves for the scattering ritual were all freshly built; there should be no old thing in the ash."

"So this bead is not from that day." Liu Zhiqiang pinched the bead with tweezers and raised it to his nostrils. Past the fire's breath, only the faintest sweetness remained, like dried tangerine peel mixed with old book-pages. He closed his eyes to discern, and shook his head.

"Wen's formula. A late Northern Song recipe — the aftertaste carries a touch of benzoin come in through Quanzhou port."

"Wen's?" Wang Guanshu took the tweezers. "Wen Ye's family?"

"Wen An's elder sister, Wen Nuan, was shopkeeper of Wen's Spice & Medicine Shop in Bianliang. The Wen house guarded the Lius — their secret line ran through spice and medicine, not the blade." Liu Zhiqiang set the bead in a white porcelain dish. "That this bead survived to today means someone deliberately mixed it into the scattering-ritual ash. The ash was sealed that very night; only the five of us could have touched it."

"Or six," Wang Guanshu said. "Before Yagyu Shizuma left, he stood a long while by the stove."

II. The Half-Line Inside the Bead

Wen Ye arrived quickly. He came in without sitting, first looking at the bead in the dish.

"My family passed down no such bead," he pinched it up to the window light. "Wen An was a young clerk at Wen's Spice & Medicine Shop in Northern Song Bianliang; I checked the genealogy — he only rose to 'keeper of the incense-register,' never in charge of compounding. It was his sister Wen Nuan who compounded."

"That fits." Liu Zhiqiang dropped the bead into warm water; the charred shell slowly dissolved, revealing a roll of ultra-thin mulberry-bark paper. The roll was thinner than a toothpick; unfolded, it was only a finger-joint long, with one line of tiny regular-script, brownish ink — Northern Song pine-soot ink.

Divided, it lives; gathered, it...

The latter half had been blotted by water, leaving only an ink dot.

"Gathered, it what?" Wen Ye frowned.

"Unknown. The paper is torn, the tear uneven, as if ripped from a whole sheet." Liu Zhiqiang spread the mulberry paper on blotting paper. "But the three characters 'divided, it lives' match 'keep the divisions, not the gathering.' What Wen An passed on then may have been more than this one line."

Wang Guanshu turned over the bead's charred shell; on the inside was carved a tiny "Wen" character, cinnabar still lodged in the cut.

"The Wen house mark. This bead was compounded by Wen Nuan herself."

III. The Old Register of Quanzhou

Wen Ye took three days' leave and ran to Quanzhou. One branch of Wen An's descendants had moved to Quanzhou, dealing in spice transshipment; the shop was long gone, but the clan still kept a fragmentary register, its cover reading "Wen Family Incense-Register · Volume Seven."

He found the book at the bottom of a camphor-wood chest in the old Quanzhou house, photographed it, and sent it back to Bianliang. Liu Zhiqiang and Wang Guanshu paged through it under the lamp. The register recorded the spice and medicine in-and-out handled by the Wen house during the Shaoxing era of the Southern Song; in an inserted page was a line of small characters, in the same hand as the mulberry paper from the bead.

Uncle An sent beads from Bianliang, charging that the bead conceal the letter; burn it upon arrival. The beads come in five colors, each taking a separate road; gathered, it...

The rest was torn away again.

Wen Ye said over the phone: "I asked the clan elders; they say the ancestors had a rule — when the bead-letter arrived, the reader did one thing only: pass the message on to the next station, then burn it. No one was allowed to gather the several roads' letters and read them together."

Liu Zhiqiang put the phone on speaker, set it on the incense-table. The bead on the table had fully dissolved; only the half-line on the mulberry paper remained.

"So what comes after 'gathered, it,' Wen An himself never let later generations know," Wang Guanshu said. "What he guarded against was precisely someone completing the letters."

"The Kukiku faction gathered for decades," Wen Ye's voice came from the phone. "Not until Yagyu Shizuma's generation did they realize they had gathered wrong."

IV. The Unfilled Line

Qu Huaisha came to the shop the next day to look at the mulberry paper. He brought a magnifier and studied it a long while.

"The Chu slips have this kind of stroke too — the last stroke of the character 'divide' drags downward, breaks off halfway; it is intentional, left unfinished." He straightened. "The ancients, writing letters, would sometimes deliberately leave a half-line, letting the recipient fill it in. Depending on who fills it, the meaning differs."

"Then whom did Wen An want to fill it in?" Liu Zhiqiang asked.

"The letter's reader," Qu Huaisha set down the magnifier. "The one he trusted."

Wang Guanshu was silent a moment, then rolled the mulberry paper up again and returned it to the white porcelain dish.

"Then let us not fill it in," she said. "Wen An left it unfinished because he did not want one sentence to become a key. 'Divided, it lives' is enough already."

Liu Zhiqiang nodded. He covered the porcelain dish and wrote a label stuck to its base: "Northern Song Wen-house bead-letter, fragmentary line, not filled in. Stored in old Bianliang shop."

Wen Ye heard it from the other end of the phone and said nothing. After a few seconds he said, "I'll be back tomorrow. There are a few more boxes of old registers in Quanzhou; I'll leaf through them again. If I find something I'll send it; if not, so be it."

"If not, so be it," Liu Zhiqiang said.

V. A Letter from Nara

Ten days after Beginning of Autumn, the shop received a letter. No signature; the envelope only read "Bianliang, Liu's Incense Shop, to be opened in person." The postmark was Nara.

Liu Zhiqiang opened it; inside was no letter-paper, only half a flake of incense-scrap, the size of a fingernail, pale white, its grain fine and dense. He leaned close to smell it, and his hand halted.

Lan She Dai. A trimming from that block at the Shosoin; the cut surface still fresh.

Beneath the scrap lay a sheet of watermark paper; held to the light, a Shosoin pattern showed through the paper — a deer, vines twined about its antlers. On the back, in pencil, were two unfamiliar characters:

The ruler is here.

Wang Guanshu took the paper and turned it over twice. "'Ruler' (chi) is the old name for Lan She Dai. Who sent it?"

"Unknown. But those who know Lan She Dai is the 'ruler' are few." Liu Zhiqiang put the scrap into the porcelain dish, beside the fragment of Wen's incense-bead paper.

Outside the window the rain began again. Rain after Beginning of Autumn is cooler than at Grain Rain, and strikes the tiles with a brittle sound.

"Grain Rain next year is still far," Wang Guanshu folded the watermark paper and slipped it into an old book. "First get this character 'ruler' sorted out."

Liu Zhiqiang closed the shop door; before the boards met, he glanced once at the lane-mouth in the rain. No one. But the cut surface of that half-flake was too fresh, as if just shaved from a whole block.

The one who shaved the incense was still there.

— unfinished · continues in Side Story 3