Agarwood Six Records · Side Story Two: Start of Autumn

Agarwood Six Records · Side Story Two: Start of Autumn

One: A Grain in the Ash

The third rain after the Start of Autumn; the old shop's tiled eaves still dripped. Liu Zhiqiang poured the ashes of the six censers, collected on the day of the Scattering Incense Rite, onto plain paper and parted them gently with a bamboo splinter. The ash was white, fine as flour; at the third censer's worth, the tip of the splinter struck something hard.

He leaned close. A bead of incense, the size of a rice grain, its skin charred black, yet inside still a trace of yellow. Not burned through.

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

"The censers of the Scattering Incense Rite were all newly laid; there shouldn't be old things in the ash." "So this bead is not from that day's." Liu Zhiqiang lifted the bead with tweezers and brought it to his nose. Past the fire's heat, only a very faint sweetness remained, like sun-dried tangerine peel mixed with the pages of an old book. He closed his eyes and discerned it, then shook his head.

"The Wen family's formula. The late-Northern-Song manner, with a note of benzoin brought in through Quanzhou port." "The Wen family?" Wang Wanshu took the tweezers. "Wen Ye's family?" "Wen An's sister, Wen Nuan, keeper of the Wen Aromatic Pharmacy in Bianliang. The Wen line guarded the Liu — the hidden channel ran through aromatics, not blades." Liu Zhiqiang set the bead into a white porcelain dish. "That this bead survived to today means someone deliberately mixed it into the ashes of the Scattering Incense Rite. The censer ashes were sealed that very night; only the five of us could have touched them." "Or six," Wang Wanshu said. "Before Liu Shengjingma left, he stood by the censers a long while."

Two: Half a Sentence Inside the Bead

Wen Ye came quickly. He entered without sitting, and went first to the bead in the dish.

"My family never handed down beads like this." He picked it up against the window light. "Wen An was a junior clerk of the Wen Aromatic Pharmacy in Northern-Song Bianliang; I checked the genealogy — he only ever held the post of 'keeper of the incense ledger'; blending was not his work. The blender was his sister, Wen Nuan." "Then that fits." Liu Zhiqiang dropped the bead into warm water; the charred shell slowly dissolved, revealing a roll of extremely thin mulberry-bark paper. The roll was thinner than a toothpick; unfolded, it was only a finger-joint long, with a line of tiny regular script, the ink browned to the hue of Northern-Song pine-soot ink.

*Divided, it lives; gathered, it...*

The second half had been blurred by water, leaving only an ink dot.

"Gathered, it what?" Wen Ye frowned.

"Unknown. The paper is torn, the break uneven, as if ripped from a whole sheet." Liu Zhiqiang spread the mulberry paper on blotting paper. "But the three characters 'divided, it lives' answer to 'guarding one's share, not hoarding the whole.' What Wen An passed on may have been more than this one sentence." Wang Wanshu turned over the bead's charred shell; inside was carved an extremely small character "wen," the stroke's mouth still holding a trace of cinnabar.

"The Wen family's mark. This bead was blended by Wen Nuan's own hand."

Three: The Old Quanzhou Ledger

Wen Ye took three days' leave and ran down to Quanzhou. One branch of Wen An's descendants had moved there to do the spice re-export trade; the shop was long gone, but the clan still kept a fragmentary ledger, its cover inscribed "The Wen Incense Ledger · Volume Seven."

He found the ledger at the bottom of a camphor-wood chest in the old Quanzhou house and photographed it, sending the images back to Bianliang. Liu Zhiqiang and Wang Wanshu turned the pages one by one under the lamp. The ledger recorded the Wen family's aromatic dealings of the Shaoxing era of the Southern Song; in a tipped-in page was a line of small characters, the hand identical to that of the mulberry paper inside the bead.

*Uncle An sent beads from Bian, instructing that the beads hide letters; when the letters arrive, burn them. The beads are of five colors, each taking a road; gathered, they...*

The rest had been torn away again.

Wen Ye said over the phone: "I asked the clan elders; they say the ancestors had one rule: when a bead-letter arrived, the one who read it did only one thing — pass the words on to the next station, and burn it after passing. No one was allowed to piece the letters of several roads together and read them." Liu Zhiqiang put the phone on speaker and set it on the incense table. The bead on the table had already dissolved; only the half-sentence on the mulberry paper remained.

"So what comes after 'gathered, they,' Wen An never let later generations know either," Wang Wanshu said. "What he guarded against was precisely someone piecing the letters together." "The Jiuju line pieced for decades," Wen Ye's voice came through the phone. "Only by Liu Shengjingma's generation did they understand they had pieced wrongly."

Four: The Sentence Not Completed

Qu Huaisha came to the shop the next day to see the mulberry paper. He brought a loupe and looked for a long while.

"Chu bamboo slips have this manner of writing too — the last stroke of the character 'divide' drags downward, breaks off halfway, deliberately left unfinished." He straightened up. "The ancients, when writing letters, sometimes deliberately left half a sentence for the recipient to complete. Different completers, different meanings." "Then whom did Wen An want to complete it?" Liu Zhiqiang asked.

"The one who read the letter." Qu Huaisha set the loupe down. "The one he trusted." Wang Wanshu was silent for a while, then rolled the mulberry paper up again and returned it to the white porcelain dish.

"Then don't complete it," she said. "Wen An left it unfinished because he did not want one sentence to become a key. 'Divided, it lives' is enough to use." Liu Zhiqiang nodded. He covered the porcelain dish and wrote a label pasted to its bottom: "Northern-Song Wen bead-letter, broken sentence, not completed. Kept at the old shop in Bianliang." Wen Ye heard it on the other end of the phone and said nothing. After a few seconds he said: "I'll be back tomorrow. There are still several chests of old ledgers on the Quanzhou side; I'll go through them again. If I find anything I'll photograph it to you; if not, let it be." "If not, let it be," Liu Zhiqiang said.

Five: A Letter from Nara

The tenth day after the Start of Autumn, the shop received a letter. No signature; on the envelope only "To the Liu Incense Shop, Bianliang — Personal." The postmark was Nara.

Liu Zhiqiang opened it. Inside there was no letter paper, only half a sliver of incense, the size of a fingernail, pale white in color, its grain fine and dense. He brought it close and smelled; his hand stopped.

Ranjatai. An offcut from the Shosoin piece — the cut face still new.

Beneath the incense sliver was pressed a watermarked paper; held to the light, a Shosoin pattern showed within it — a deer, vines twined about its antlers. On the back of the paper two characters written in pencil, in an unfamiliar hand: *The yardstick remains.*

Wang Wanshu took the paper and turned it over twice. "'Yardstick' is the old name for Ranjatai. Who sent it?" "Unknown. But those who know Ranjatai is the yardstick are not many." Liu Zhiqiang put the incense sliver into the porcelain dish, laid side by side with the fragmentary paper of the Wen bead.

Outside the window rain began to fall again. The rain after the Start of Autumn is cooler than that of Grain Rain; striking the tiles, its sound is brittle.

"Next Grain Rain is still far off," Wang Wanshu folded the watermarked paper and slipped it into an old book. "First make sense of this character 'yardstick.'" Liu Zhiqiang closed the shop door; before the boards drew together, he glanced at the mouth of the alley in the rain. No one. But the cut face of that half sliver of incense was too new, as if freshly shaved from the whole piece.

The one who shaved the incense is still here.

— To be continued · Side Story 3

> 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.