Agarwood Chronicles · Side Story 9 · Minor Snow

I.

On Minor Snow, the man from Quanzhou stood outside the shop without an umbrella.

Rain mixed with sleet fell on his shoulders like a thin layer of salt. He wore a washed-out indigo short jacket, and in his arms he held an oilcloth bundle, square and neat.

"Liu Family Agarwood and Sandalwood Shop." He looked up at the plaque and read it aloud, his voice very soft. "My great-grandfather said the lacquer on this plaque was mixed by the Wen family."

Liu Zhijiang stepped aside to let him in. Wang Guanshu had already brewed tea and set it on the old table by the window. The man untied the oilcloth slowly, layer by layer, as if opening a letter sealed for centuries.

Inside was a ledger, its pages brittle and yellow, edges gnawed by sea wind and hardened with salt stains.

"My great-grandfather was Cai Aliu. In the late Song, he managed cargo for others at Quanzhou port." The man pushed the ledger forward. "Before he died, he left word that this ledger was not his, but kept for a manager surnamed Wen. Manager Wen asked him to transport a box north by sea. The box never arrived, and Manager Wen never returned."

II.

The ledger was not thick. Liu Zhijiang turned to the third page and stopped.

In the corner was a very faint seal, a circle enclosing the character "Wen", the ink mixed with agarwood ash so the color was gray and inconspicuous. Beside the seal was a line of small characters:

Third box, dispatched after Frost Descent, to arrive in the capital before Minor Snow. Entrusted to Cai for transport, via Quanzhou—Mingzhou—Bian.

"Wen An's handwriting." Wang Guanshu leaned in and looked for a long time. "He wrote 'arrive in the capital', but this is a Quanzhou cargo ledger. He was in Bianliang—how could he send the box from Quanzhou back to Bianliang?"

Liu Zhijiang flipped further. A dozen pages in the middle had been torn out, the edges uneven, as if pulled in haste. Beneath the tear marks was half a sheet of paper, whiter than the ledger paper and with finer fibers—Japanese kozo paper.

On the half sheet were only three lines:

Orchid ash received, mother agarwood verified.
But the box bottom is anomalous, not the original vessel.
Take care. Nara.

No signature. On the back was a crease, and in the crease was lodged a bit of gray-white powder. Liu Zhijiang scraped off a little with his fingernail and held it close to the lamp. The gray-white had a faint orchid tint—the agarwood ash unique to the bottom of the Ranjatai box. When the old Shosoin box was repaired, craftsmen collected the old ash scraped from the bottom into paper packets as verification evidence.

"The reply from Nara says the box bottom is wrong." He laid the paper flat. "The box Wen An sent was recognized upon arrival in Nara as not the original vessel."

"Then it was swapped on the way," Wang Guanshu said.

III.

The Cai descendant knew nothing of incense, but remembered one thing his great-grandfather had said: when that box passed through Mingzhou, it changed ships.

"My great-grandfather said he was originally escorting the cargo, but when they reached Mingzhou port, someone came to claim it with a note from Manager Wen, and the note had a seal." The man thought for a moment. "My great-grandfather couldn't read; he only looked at the seal. The seal was correct, so he handed it over."

"Is the note still around?" Liu Zhijiang asked.

"Yes." He fished out a bamboo tag from his robe, slightly narrower than a palm, carved with a circle, but inside the circle was not the character "Wen" but a five-petaled chrysanthemum.

When Yanagiu Shizuma took the bamboo tag, his fingertip paused on the chrysanthemum pattern.

"This is a 'proxy pickup tag' from the old rules of the Yanagiu Incense House," he said. "The nine-chrysanthemum school used such tags early on to transfer goods. The chrysanthemum has five petals, tips curved inward—this is the carving style of the Nishijin area in Kyoto. But this one has an empty chrysanthemum center."

"What does an empty chrysanthemum center mean?" Wang Guanshu asked.

"It means the person picking up the goods was not one of the chrysanthemum members." Yanagiu Shizuma turned the tag over; on the back was a knife mark, very shallow, as if accidentally scratched during a test cut. "It was imitated by an outsider. The imitator had seen a real tag but had never entered the chrysanthemum gate."

Liu Zhijiang placed the bamboo tag next to the Nara reply. The reply said "the box bottom is anomalous"; the tag was the proof of pickup in Mingzhou. The two events were separated by a sea, yet linked on the same ring: someone in Mingzhou swapped out the third box, and the one substituted had a wrong bottom.

"The swapper knew Nara would verify the box bottom," he said. "So he substituted a fake, making Nara think Wen An had sent the wrong one."

"But Nara still replied." Wang Guanshu pointed at the three lines. "'Take care.' They did not treat Wen An as a fraud; they warned him."

IV.

The rain lessened. Sleet still fell, landing on the doorsill, not accumulating, turning to water stains.

Yanagiu Shizuma put the bamboo tag back on the table, chrysanthemum pattern facing down.

"The man with the empty chrysanthemum center was later active around Quanzhou," he said. "Old Kyoto records mention someone who called himself 'Frost Guest', who specialized in collecting old incense vessels from Song merchants—collecting to swap, swapping to scatter. He did not collect incense; he only swapped boxes."

"What was the point of swapping boxes?"

"To make sure the real box could not find its real bottom." Yanagiu Shizuma looked up. "Frost Guest may not have known what the Six Incenses were. He only knew that boxes have bottoms, bottoms have ash, and ash can match characters. If he swapped the bottom, the characters would no longer match."

Liu Zhijiang was silent for a while. He thought of Wen An's line in the letter: "If the characters are there, the thread is there." The thread was there, but a section had been cut out and a fake spliced in.

"Where is the third box now?"

"The pages torn from the ledger recorded its whereabouts," the Cai descendant suddenly spoke up. "My great-grandfather couldn't read, but he remembered there were drawings on those pages. A mountain, and below it a curved line, and at the end of the curved line a cross."

Wang Guanshu held the ledger up to the lamp. On the remaining paper stubs, there were indeed faint ink traces. She tilted it to the light and slowly made them out: the mountain outline resembled Wuyi, the curved line resembled the Min River, and the cross fell on a small place name on the north bank of the estuary.

"After Frost Descent, before Minor Snow," she read softly. "Wen An wrote the time, but when the time came, the box did not arrive."

"Because the box was swapped in Mingzhou," Liu Zhijiang said. "The real one was taken by Frost Guest to the Min River estuary."

He closed the ledger. On the inside of the back cover was a line added later, the ink newer than the main text, but the handwriting still Wen An's:

The frost box is in the north, the ash is in Nara, the characters are in Bian.

"Frost Box," Wang Guanshu said. "He gave the swapped box a name."

Outside the window, the snow suddenly thickened for a moment, then thinned again. The wind chime at the eaves rang once, very briefly.

Liu Zhijiang turned the bamboo tag over, empty chrysanthemum center facing up. He looked at it for a long time and said, "Minor Snow has passed. The thread's end is not in our hands; it is at the Min River estuary."

Yanagiu Shizuma stood up and pushed the bamboo tag back toward the Cai descendant, but did not let go.

"When Frost Guest swapped the box, he left a proxy pickup tag," he said. "But a tag is dead. If Frost Guest is still alive, he must still have a box in his possession—not the third box, but the one that contained the third box."

—To be continued · Side Story 10