Agarwood Six Records · Side Story Five: Grain Rain

Agarwood Six Records · Side Story Five: Grain Rain

Grain Rain: the rain quickens a hundred grains, and a hundred perplexities.

West of Bianliang city, at the Liu family's Agarwood & Sandalwood Shop, the doorboards stood half-unhinged, threads of rain sweeping in aslant, seeping dark water marks into the blue-brick floor. Liu Zhiqiang crouched behind the counter, laying the last piece of incense charcoal into the bronze censer. Wang Wanshu stood on a ladder, taking down from among the roof beams an oilpaper bundle, the paper brownish-yellow, the knot still tied in the Northern Song manner. Wen Ye reached out to catch it, weighed it, and frowned: "That's all?" "One wisp of each of the five fragrances — less than three qian all together." Wang Wanshu jumped down from the ladder, her cuff kicking up a scatter of raindrops. "The Jiuju hoarded for eight hundred years, and this is all they amassed."

Qu Huaisha sat by the window, a traced copy spread before him — a detail of the small shop at the end of the Palace Museum's "Along the River During the Qingming Festival." With a fingertip he pointed at the blurred figure behind the counter in the painting. "Look — this man's left hand presses empty, his right holds incense, and on the table six censers stand in a half-arc. Everyone used to think it was lighting incense; in fact it was dividing incense." He looked up at Liu Shengjingma. "Mr. Liu Shengjingma, that page of *The Rules of Incense* your father left behind — is this drawn there too?"

Liu Shengjingma knelt on a cushion, a lacquer box laid across before his knees. He opened the lid: inside were five small porcelain vials, each marked with a glazed dot in one of five colors — white, green, purple, black, and yellow. "When my father retrieved my sister's remains in Kosovo, this page was pressed at the bottom of the box." He took out a yellowed thin sheet; on it six censers were outlined in ink lines, annotated in small characters: *Union is not gathering; it is dividing at the same time.*

"So the seventh note…" Wen Ye got halfway and stopped himself.

Liu Zhiqiang stood and drew from his breast an incense seal — the half bearing the character "guarding," its edges worn round. "The seventh note is not an incense." He set the seal on the table, fitting it against Wang Wanshu's half bearing the character "record," seamless. "It is this rite itself. The Ranjatai is the mother incense, verifying the other five; but the six fragrances never appear in the world at the same time — unless they are lit at once, scattered at once." "And the fingerprints in the Shosoin?" Wen Ye pressed.

Qu Huaisha unrolled another photograph: the cross-section of the Ranjatai held in the Shosoin at Nara, three shallow fingerprints among the grain. "I have compared the signature marks on the surviving pages of the *Manual of the Six Incenses*. One is the Liu family's 'guarding' seal; one is the Wen Aromatic Pharmacy's 'Wen' mark; and the third—" He paused. "Is Huang Tingjian's private seal." "Huang Tingjian?" Wang Wanshu started. "When did he ever go to Japan?" "He never went." Liu Zhiqiang took it up. "But in the Yuanyou era of the Northern Song, a party of incense envoys crossed east with the merchant ships, carrying the Liu family's divided incense of the Ranjatai to the Shosoin for verification. The leader was surnamed Liu, the deputy surnamed Wen, and the one who recorded the incense along the way was a disciple of Huang Tingjian's. The fingerprints were pressed then, meaning — this incense has been divided; this promise has been kept."

Liu Shengjingma looked down at the five-colored vials in the lacquer box and suddenly laughed, very lightly. "My sister used to say the Great Unity should not be left scattered among vulgar hands. What she never saw was that what scatters is not the incense — it is people." He raised his head; there was rain-light in his eyes. "Incense gathered in one place can be burned once; people scattered to the four quarters can guard for a lifetime."

The rain suddenly thickened. Liu Zhiqiang set the six bronze censers on the table in a half-arc and fed in, one after another, the fragments of the five fragrances and a small pinch of Ranjatai crumbs — the trace sample Wang Wanshu's father Wang Shouzhuo had, in his lifetime, scraped from a Shosoin tracing, kept ever since sealed in a wax pellet. The six censers were lit at once; six-colored flames — white, green, purple, black, yellow, white Ranjatai — rose, twined together a moment in the damp air, then parted and burned steady, each on its own.

"Union is the rite, not possession," Qu Huaisha murmured to the flames. "The people of Chu honored the orchid and used division to revere the gods. Division is not scattering — it is each keeping its place." Liu Shengjingma took a brocade pouch from his breast and poured out the last few fragments of the Jiuju's secret hoard, casting them into the yellow censer. The flame jumped, then settled. He pressed his palms in salute, stepped back, and gave his place to Wen Ye. Wen Ye came forward and cast into the censer the preface of the incense manual he had copied from the public-security cultural-relics archives; paper ash rose, swirling up with the incense smoke.

Wang Wanshu came last, casting into the white censer the half-brush her father had left when he restored "Along the River During the Qingming Festival." The brush handle burned with a faint crackling, very much like rain striking window paper.

When the six censers had burned out, the ash was still warm. Liu Zhiqiang ladled the ash of the six censers with a bronze spoon into six plain-paper bundles, one for each. When Liu Shengjingma received the yellow censer's ash, his fingers trembled faintly, yet he said nothing; he only bowed deeply, turned, and walked into the rain.

Wen Ye tucked the bundle into the inside pocket of his police uniform and clapped Liu Zhiqiang's shoulder. "Next time the Jiuju come, I'll tell them — the incense is gone; the people remain." Qu Huaisha rolled up the tracing and laughed. "I must get back to the museum and revise my paper. These five characters, 'guarding one's share, not hoarding the whole' — enough to fill thirty thousand." The others drifted away. Liu Zhiqiang and Wang Wanshu locked up last. The rain had lessened; the eaves dripped onto the stone steps, one long, one short. Wang Wanshu said suddenly: "Smell." Liu Zhiqiang turned his head. There was no fragrance at all in the air, only the smells of rain and earth. But he knew what she meant — eight hundred years earlier, Su Dongpo had smelled this same Grain Rain in the shop; when Zhang Zeduan painted the small shop at the scroll's end, the same rain had been falling outside the window.

"Guarding one's share, not hoarding the whole." Liu Zhiqiang parted the two incense seals again, one back into his breast, one held out to Wang Wanshu. "Scatter, then." Wang Wanshu took the seal, turned toward the mouth of the alley, and after a few steps looked back, shaking the plain-paper bundle in her hand at him. "Next Grain Rain — remember to come to the Wen registry for new tea." Liu Zhiqiang waved and shut the shop door. Before the boards drew together he looked one last time at Bianliang in the rain — the modern towers blurring in the rain into the flying eaves of the Northern Song, while that small shop at the end of "Along the River During the Qingming Festival" shone with an undying lamp.

The incense has scattered. Those who discern incense are scattered across the world, each keeping one quarter — this is the true guarding.

— *Agarwood Six Records · The Side Stories*: the complete text, end

> 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.