The Six Records of Agarwood — Side Story V: Grain Rain

The Six Records of Agarwood — side story, part five

Grain Rain — the rain gives birth to a hundred grains, and to a hundred doubts as well.

At the Liu family's Chen-Tan shop west of Bianliang, the boards were half lowered; rain-threads slanted in, staining dark watermarks on the blue-brick floor. Liu Zhiqiang crouched behind the counter, settling the last piece of incense-charcoal into the bronze burner. Wang Guanshu stood on a ladder, taking down an oil-paper parcel from the beam; its paper was brown-yellow, its cord-knot still in the Northern Song style. Wen Ye caught it, weighed it, and frowned: "Just this much?"

"A wisp of each of the five incenses — together under three qian," Wang Guanshu jumped down, her sleeve stirring a spray of fine rain. "Kukiku hid them eight hundred years and only amassed this."

Qu Huaisha sat by the window, a facsimile spread before him — a detail of the tiny shop at the scroll's end of "Along the River During the Qingming Festival," held in the Palace Museum. He pointed with a fingertip at the blurred figure behind the counter in the painting: "Look — this person presses with the left hand as if lightly, holds incense in the right, and six burners stand in a half-arc on the table. Everyone thought it was lighting incense; it was actually dividing it." He looked up at Yagyu Shizuma. "Mr. Yagyu, didn't that page of 'Incense Precepts' your father left also depict this?"

Yagyu Shizuma knelt on a cushion, a lacquer box laid across his knees. He opened the lid; inside were five small porcelain vials, each marked with a dot of white, green, purple, black, or yellow glaze. "When my father recovered my sister's belongings in Kosovo, this page was pressed under the box's bottom," he drew out a yellowed thin sheet, on which ink-lines sketched six burners, annotated in small characters: "To unite is not to gather, but to divide at the same time."

"So the seventh scent..." Wen Ye's words trailed off, and he stopped himself.

Liu Zhiqiang stood and drew a scent-seal from his breast — half a "keep" character, its corners worn smooth. "The seventh scent is not an incense," he set the seal on the table and fitted it to Wang Guanshu's half "record" character; they matched seamlessly. "It is this rite itself. Lan She Dai is the mother incense, calibrating the other five; but the six incenses never appear in the world together — unless lit at the same moment, and scattered at the same moment."

"And the Shosoin fingerprint?" Wen Ye pressed.

Qu Huaisha unfolded another photo — a cross-section of the Lan She Dai held at the Nara Shosoin, with three faint fingertip marks in the wood grain. "I compared it with the signature-seal on the fragment of 'The Six-Incense Manual.' One is the Liu family's 'keep' seal; one is the Wen Spice & Medicine Shop's 'Wen' mark; and the other..." he paused, "is Huang Tingjian's private seal."

"Huang Tingjian?" Wang Guanshu started. "When did he ever go to Japan?"

"He never did," Liu Zhiqiang took up the thread. "But in the Yuanyou years of the Northern Song, a party of incense-envoys crossed east on merchant ships, to bring Lan She Dai's divided incense to the Shosoin for calibration. The leader was surnamed Liu, the deputy surnamed Wen, and the accompanying incense-recorder was a disciple of Huang Tingjian. The prints were pressed then — meaning: this incense is divided, this vow is kept."

Yagyu Shizuma looked down at the five-colored vials in the lacquer box, and suddenly laughed, very softly: "My sister used to say that Great Unity should not fall into the hands of mediocre men. But she never worked it out — what scatters is not the incense, but the people." He raised his head; rain-light was in his eyes. "Gathered in one place, incense can only burn once; scattered to the four quarters, it can be kept for a lifetime."

The rain suddenly thickened. Liu Zhiqiang arranged the six bronze burners in a half-arc on the table and fed in turn the five incense fragments and a pinch of Lan She Dai crumbs — a minute sample Wang Guanshu's father, Wang Shouzhuo, had scraped from the Shosoin facsimile in his life and sealed in a wax pill. Six burners lit at once; the six flame-tongues of Bai, Lv, Zi, Hei, Huang, and Bai She Dai rose, tangled in the damp air a moment, then parted each its own way, burning steadily.

"To unite is a rite, not possession," Qu Huaisha murmured to the flame. "The Chu people honored the orchid, to divide and revere the gods. To divide is not to scatter in disorder, but each to keep its place."

Yagyu Shizuma drew a brocade pouch from his breast and poured out the last few flakes of Kukiku's secret store of incense into the yellow burner. The flame leapt, then calmed. He pressed his palms in salute, stepped back, and yielded his place to Wen Ye. Wen Ye stepped forward and dropped into the burner the preface to the Six-Incense Manual copied from the public-security cultural-relics archive; the paper-ash flew up, spiraling with the incense-smoke.

Wang Guanshu stepped up last, and threw into the white burner the half brush her father had left while restoring "Along the River During the Qingming Festival." The shaft burned, giving off a faint crackle, much like rain on window-paper.

The six burners spent; the ash was still warm. Liu Zhiqiang scooped each burner's ash with a bronze spoon into six plain paper packets, one per person. When Yagyu Shizuma took the yellow burner's ash, his fingers trembled slightly, but he said nothing — only bowed deeply and turned into the rain.

Wen Ye tucked the paper packet into his police-uniform's inner pocket and patted Liu Zhiqiang's shoulder: "Next time Kukiku comes, I'll tell them — the incense is gone, but the people remain."

Qu Huaisha rolled up the facsimile and laughed: "I must get back to the museum and revise my paper. These five characters 'keep the divisions, not the gathering' are worth thirty thousand words."

All had dispersed. Liu Zhiqiang and Wang Guanshu locked the door last. The rain had eased; drops from the eaves tapped the stone step, one long, one short. Wang Guanshu suddenly said: "Smell." Liu Zhiqiang tilted his head; there was no incense in the air, only the smell of rain and earth. But he knew what she meant — eight hundred years before, Su Dongpo had smelled this same Grain Rain in this shop; and when Zhang Zeduan painted the tiny shop at the scroll's end, such rain had fallen outside his window too.

"Keep the divisions, not the gathering," Liu Zhiqiang separated the two scent-seals again — one back into his breast, one handed to Wang Guanshu. "Let us scatter."

Wang Guanshu took the seal, turned toward the lane-mouth, walked a few steps, then looked back and shook her plain paper packet at him: "Next Grain Rain, remember to come to Wen's for new tea."

Liu Zhiqiang waved a hand and closed the shop door. Before the boards met, he took one last look at Bianliang in the rain-curtain — modern high-rises blurred in the rain into Northern Song eaves, and the tiny shop at the scroll's end of "Along the River During the Qingming Festival" glowed with an unextinguished lamp.

The incense was scattered. Those who discern the incense scattered into the human world, each keeping one quarter — that is the true keeping.

— "The Six Records of Agarwood," Side Stories, complete.