Scent Thread · Chapter One: The Black Wood on the Old House's Threshold

Scent Thread · Chapter One: The Black Wood on the Old House's Threshold

Prologue

The rain that had fallen for seven days without pause over Tanniu township, in Wenchang, Hainan, had stopped.

When Chen Yanqiu stepped back onto the wet blue stone slabs leading to the old family house, half of the giant banyan at the village entrance had already fallen. The purpose of this trip was worldly enough: to sell the house. His parents had died early, and the house had stood empty for eleven years; in those years he had moved from Guangzhou to Shenzhen, risen from an ordinary clerk to middle management, until he kept postponing his return home from once a year to once every three years.

The agent had told him that an old house like this, left untreated, would collapse after the rainy season.

1

The old house was built in his grandfather's time: a three-courtyard dwelling, with a threshold said to be made of local putang wood. All that remained of his memory of his ancestors were three fragments: his grandfather lying in bed smoking a water pipe; a sky-blue porcelain incense burner on the ancestral altar, missing one corner; and a single phrase the village elders repeated again and again—"That threshold of your grandfather's is a treasure." As a child he had taken it for old men's boasting; country folk see a treasure in everything.

Now he stood in the middle of the main hall; a corner of the roof boards had fallen in above his head, exposing a crossbeam threshold of pitch-black wood. Rain dripped through the opening onto the square baxian table, onto a layer of dust half an inch thick. He stood in place under his umbrella, and suddenly smelled something.

Very faint, but strange—not the smell of mold. Old houses in the rainy season are bound to be moldy, yet the air carried a cool, somewhat sweet thread, a medicinal fragrance, like mint leaves steeped in honey, and like the smell that used to rise from the door of the herbal shop when he was small, only purer and colder.

He raised his flashlight and pointed it at the threshold.

The wood was black all through; a deep black with a damp sheen. In the cracks could be seen oily lines of varying shades, like frozen ink split by a fingernail. He stood on tiptoe to touch it—cold, hard; but where his nail passed, he felt a strange sticky texture.

The next morning Chen Yanqiu sent the agent a message: "Let's postpone selling the house for now."

2

The villager who knew most about wood was Uncle Fu, eighty years old, who had worked thirty years in the town's furniture factory. The old man squatted in the courtyard and smoked half a cigarette, and studied the threshold for a long time; then he said something that kept Chen Yanqiu awake half the night: "That threshold of yours, I don't think it's ordinary firewood. It's agarwood." "Agarwood?" "I won't swear to it. But if it really is old Aquilaria sinensis material, and it sinks in water..." Uncle Fu stubbed out the cigarette butt. "In the nineties your grandfather collected raw materials; a man paid him with a whole boatload of wood, and he made it all into thresholds. The whole village laughed and said he was mad. Go now and search the camphor wood chest that belonged to your grandfather; there's a bundle of oil paper in it, with the leftover pieces from that same boatload." The bundle was found; in it were seven or eight finger-sized scraps, dark brown, their cut faces glossy with oil. Chen Yanqiu set a corner of one alight with his lighter—the moment the flame touched it, a coolness came out first, then the sweetness, and in the sweetness a milky note, settling at last into a steady warmth like that of resin. The smoke did not choke the chest, and the ash was white.

No sooner had Uncle Fu smelled the smoke than his hand stopped in midair.

"The breath of Nha Trang... no, it's steadier than Nha Trang." The old man was silent a long while. "Yanqiu, don't appraise this material and don't sell it. Start first: take that threshold, get a specialist, and bring it down whole."

3

Chen Yanqiu searched for three days and found in Haikou an elderly man specializing in the evaluation of agarwood materials, named Liang, who had worked at the forestry science institute before retiring.

Uncle Liang put on white gloves and studied the sample taken from the threshold under a magnifying glass for a full twenty minutes, then asked Chen Yanqiu three questions: Were there nail holes in the trunk? How old was the house? And had this material been taken from a wound site on the trunk?

"The house was built in the forties. My grandfather said the threshold was old material whose resin formed naturally after wounding; the details aren't clear." Uncle Liang took off his glasses and wiped them for a long time.

"Young Chen, let me start with the hard truth. In the agarwood market there are more stories than materials—remember that sentence all your life." He put the sample back in its cotton paper. "But I can tell you two things for certain. First: this is real agarwood, and its oil content is higher than anything I've seen in house thresholds in all my years in this field. And second—" He paused a little.

"Second: the way its resin formed is very unusual. A natural wound, then fungal infection, then aging of at least sixty years. This material can't be bought on the market, because no one would dare turn sixty-year-aged material into a house threshold." "Then how much is it worth?" "If I gave you a number, I'd be the one you should distrust." Uncle Liang laughed. "Here's what we do: I'll introduce you to a man who runs instrumental testing and issues a composition report. And before that report comes out, don't believe anyone who names you a price—including me."

4

He left Uncle Liang's office as evening came on. Chen Yanqiu stood on the pedestrian bridge on Haidian Island and sent a long message to his company in Shenzhen. He thought a long time about the subject line, and in the end wrote just four words: annual leave request.

On his phone, the agent was still asking whether the house would be sold in the end. Gazing at the Haikou sunset, he suddenly remembered the sky-blue porcelain incense burner on the ancestral altar in his childhood, the small piece of agarwood his grandfather used to light every morning—so it had not been an old man's tall tale after all.

A family had been quietly raising a piece of amber out of time.

(End of Chapter One; tomorrow: Chapter Two, "The Test Report and the Uninvited Guest")

> This is a serialized work of fiction from "The Six Records of Agarwood"; the characters and plot are invented. The knowledge of agarwood and defects herein is drawn from public sources and does not constitute investment or medical advice.