Three Hundred Bolts

In the Tenth Year of the Wen Era, on the third day of the eighth month, the tribute silk came up the canal three hundred bolts short, and the first person to hear of it in the inner court was a woman of the second rank who had no business hearing it at all.

Shen Yuelan was a Lady. The six ranks of the inner court were recited to every girl on the morning she passed the gate, and she had never forgotten the order: Attendant, Lady, Concubine, Consort, Noble Consort, Empress. An Attendant swept and carried. A Lady had a chamber of her own and two maids. A Concubine had a courtyard. A Consort had a hall. A Noble Consort had a hall and a seal of her own. Above them all sat the Empress, and there was only ever one. Yuelan had been a Lady for two years, which was long enough to know that the second rank was the most dangerous of the six. High enough to be noticed. Low enough to be discarded.

"Three hundred bolts," said the maid Little Qiu, breathless, kneeling at the edge of the mat. "The barge master swears the count was full at the southern lock. The Ministry of Rites swears it was short when the rolls were opened. Someone must answer for it before the Autumn Rites."

"Which someone?"

Little Qiu looked at the floor. "The secretary who signed the receiving roll was Secretary Shen."

Yuelan's father, Shen Guo, was a secretary of the seventh grade in the Ministry of Rites. There were nine grades of officials in the empire, and they ran from the ninth grade, which was the lowest, up to the first grade, which only three living men held. A secretary of the seventh grade did not decide anything. He wrote down what other men had decided. But a signature is a signature, and when silk goes missing, the court looks for the nearest name.

She pressed a string of two hundred cash into Little Qiu's hand. Cash came in strings of a hundred, and a thousand cash made one silver tael; a Lady received four taels a month and spent most of it on exactly this, on girls who ran between the courtyards with news. "Go to the laundry gate and listen. If the Chief Steward's people say anything about my father, come back."

The palace was built in rings, and everyone in it knew which ring they belonged to. The outer court was the court of the ministries, where men in black caps argued over grain and rites and the calendar. The inner court was the court of the women, walled off behind the Gate of Returning Clouds, and no man entered it except the Emperor and the eunuchs who served him. At the heart of the inner court, higher than any hall but the Empress's own, stood Still Water. That was what the maids called it. Its proper name was the Hall of Still Water, and it was where the seals were kept, where the ledgers were kept, and where the Empress heard petitions on the first and fifteenth of each month.

There was one rule about the rings that every consort learned before she learned the names of the ranks. No consort might leave the inner court without the Empress's seal. Not for a dying mother, not for a festival, not for a summons from the Emperor himself. The seal was a block of white jade the size of a child's fist, carved with a lotus, and it lived in the Hall of Still Water under the care of the Keeper of Seals.

The Keeper of Seals was the eunuch Gao Fu. Yuelan had known him since her first winter in the palace, when she had been an Attendant with chapped hands and he had given her a jar of goose fat without being asked. Gao Fu was sixty, bent, and precise, and he had served the Late Emperor for thirty years before serving this one. He was not the Chief Steward. The Chief Steward of the inner court was the eunuch Pei Rong, a younger man with a smooth face and a smoother voice, who outranked Gao Fu in every list but the one that mattered, which was the Empress's trust.

Yuelan went to find Gao Fu, because he kept the ledgers, and the ledgers would show what the receiving roll had actually said.

She found her cousin first.

Shen Yuling was an Attendant, the first rank and the lowest, and she had come into the palace a year after Yuelan on the strength of the same family name. The two of them were the daughters of brothers. People who did not know them said they looked alike, and people who did know them said they did not. Yuling was a finger's width shorter and laughed with her mouth open. She was carrying a basin of water across the courtyard of the Western Pavilion when Yuelan passed, and she set it down so hard it slopped.

"Is it true about Uncle?"

"It is true that someone is saying it." Yuelan took her cousin's wet hands. "Yuling, listen. If anyone asks you about the silk, you know nothing. You are an Attendant. You carry water."

"I carry water," Yuling said, and her mouth trembled, and then she picked up the basin.

The Hall of Still Water stood at the end of a raised walk over a pond. In the pond lived the Moon Carp, a single white fish as long as a man's arm, which had been placed there by the Late Emperor and was older than most of the women who fed it. The Late Emperor had died four years ago, in the Sixth Year of the Wen Era, and his son had kept the era name out of filial piety and kept the fish for the same reason. The maids said the Moon Carp knew every secret spoken on the walk above it. Yuelan, who had spoken several, hoped it did not.

Gao Fu was at his desk inside, with the lotus seal in its lacquered box at his elbow and three ledgers open before him. He did not rise, because his knees no longer allowed it, but he inclined his head.

"The Lady Shen. I thought you might come."

"The receiving roll," she said. "What did it say?"

"It said what rolls say." He turned a ledger toward her. "Four thousand bolts received, in three grades. First-grade silk for the altar cloths, eight hundred. Second-grade for the officials' robes, two thousand. Third-grade for the attendants and the stores, twelve hundred. Signed by Secretary Shen of the seventh grade, countersigned by the clerk Ma Deshun, and the whole roll stamped with the Minister's seal, as every roll from the Ministry of Rites is."

"And the shortfall?"

"Three hundred bolts of second-grade. The robes, not the altar cloths. Someone wanted the officials to look shabby at the Autumn Rites, or someone wanted three hundred bolts of good silk, and I cannot yet tell you which." He closed the ledger. "The Minister of Rites will want it settled. The Autumn Rites are on the ninth day of the ninth month, and the rites are his."

The Minister of Rites was Wei Zhengde, an official of the second grade, and he was the Empress's elder brother. Everyone in the inner court knew it, and everyone pretended it did not matter. The Empress Wei Shuhua had been married to the Emperor Li Chengxu since the year of his accession; he was her husband, and she was his wife, and whatever else was said about them in the courtyards, nobody said that marriage was a weak one. The Minister had placed his sister on the phoenix throne, and the Empress had placed her brother at the head of the Ministry of Rites, and the two of them held the calendar of the empire between them like a scroll held open at both ends.

"If my father is dismissed," Yuelan said slowly, "my rank goes with him."

"If your father is dismissed," Gao Fu agreed, "you will be a Lady without a family, and a Lady without a family is an Attendant by spring." He laid one thin hand on the lacquered box. "So do not let him be dismissed. Petition the Empress on the fifteenth. Bring the roll. I will have the clerk's countersignature copied by then, and we will see whose hand it truly is."

She bowed to him, deeper than a Lady need bow to a eunuch, and went out along the walk. The Moon Carp rose once under her feet, pale as a lantern, and sank.

At the Gate of Returning Clouds she stopped, because she could see through it to the outer court, to the black caps moving between the ministries, and somewhere among them her father with his seventh-grade sash, waiting to learn whether the court would find a nearer name than his. She could not go to him. The rule was the rule, and the seal was in the box at Gao Fu's elbow.

"Twelve days," she said to no one. "Twelve days until the fifteenth."

Behind her, in the Western Pavilion, her cousin was still carrying water.