Chapter 36: The Hall of Ward Elders

The Ministry of Rites’ great hall had not been used for its proper purpose in three thousand years.

It had been used for audiences, for edicts, for the receiving of embassies and the reading of imperial birthdays. It had a high roof with gilded rafters, a dais at one end with a red carpet, and a long marble floor that had been designed, one suspected, to make visitors feel small. On the first day of the month, the dais was empty. The carpet had been rolled up and taken away. And in its place, down the long center of the hall, thirty-six plain wooden stools had been set out in a ring.

The Ward Elders sat on them.

They did not look like a court. They looked like what they were: a baker with flour still in the creases of his knuckles, two carters with weathered faces, a midwife in a clean white apron, a blind old storyteller with a bamboo staff laid across his knees. A woman who kept a school for orphans in the Ninth Ward, small and neat and sharp-eyed, with a stack of slates. A retired soldier of the Western Army named Shi, gray-headed, with one empty sleeve, who sat very straight and wore all of his medals.

They sat in the middle of the marble hall with their hands folded in their laps and their feet not quite flat on the floor, like children brought to a feast too grand for them, and stared at the gilded rafters.

Li Xuan was not on the dais. He sat in the back, on a low wooden bench by the door, with a lap-desk across his knees, a bamboo brush, and a stack of paper. He had been given a title by the Grand Secretary, with some difficulty, and with a very pained expression: Recorder of the Wards. It meant, as far as he could tell, that he wrote down what was said, and did not interfere.

He had never been so happy in his life.

"Elders of the Wards," said Grand Secretary Lin Wenyuan, standing alone on the bare marble, with his white beard on his chest and his hands clasped in his sleeves, "it is the custom of this hall that when the Ministry speaks, the Ministry stands. Today it is the custom that when the realm speaks, the Ministry listens." He bowed, very deeply. "Speak."

No one spoke.

It was the baker, in the end. He cleared his throat, and stood up, and turned his cap over twice in his floury hands.

"The price of lamp oil," he said.

They looked at him.

"It has doubled since the autumn." He was beet-red. "I have been told to speak of grand things. But I have two ovens and a wife and seven children, and I cannot bake in the dark."

There was a ripple of laughter, nervous and warm. Li Xuan bent over his paper, and wrote it down. Lamp oil. Doubled since autumn. Baker, Ward Four.

After that, the dam broke.

They spoke for six hours. The carters, about the roads, which had not been mended since the old Emperor’s father, and which broke more axles in a year than the Ministry of Revenue had ever counted. The midwife, about a ward that had no midwife at all, and women in labor who walked across the city in the cold. The woman with the slates, quietly, about a schoolhouse that had a roof made of rags. The blind storyteller, about the sewers. A bent old woman who had come from the outer districts spoke about the clerks, and the red ink, and her sister, and could not go on. Nobody interrupted her. After a moment, Sergeant Shi got up, and walked over, and laid his one hand on her shoulder, and stood beside her until she was done.

Li Xuan wrote it all down.

He wrote until his hand cramped. He wrote in the small, upright, clerkly hand he had learned from the Archive, and as he wrote, in the jade hall of his spirit, the silver thread of the Mind Palace moved along the Dragon-Vein Core, and laid itself against one black strand, and then another, and another, and each of them came away from the gold with a faint, bright, rueful sigh.

Twenty-one, said the palace. Nineteen. Seventeen.

He did not look up.

At the third watch of the afternoon, there was a stir at the doors.

The hall’s great bronze doors had been left ajar, for the air, and through the gap, a ripple of sound came in, a long way off: hooves, many hooves, and voices, and the sharp, strange, high-pitched cry of a rider in the Wilderness tongue.

Grand Secretary Lin stopped speaking.

A clerk burst in, red-faced and out of breath. "Grand Secretary! The western gate! There are riders. Three hundred, perhaps. Wilderness riders. Horsemen with bows. They have come to the capital under a white banner and they are asking for the Recorder of the Wards."

The elders turned as one.

"Barbarians," said a carter, hoarsely.

"Under a white banner," said the blind storyteller, without moving his head. "I can hear the cloth. It is a flag of parley."

"They killed my brother at Iron Pass," said Sergeant Shi very quietly.

No one else spoke.

Li Xuan laid down his brush. He rose from his bench by the door, and bowed to the hall, and said, in a low, even voice: "Grand Secretary. May I ask for the courtesy of the Founder’s Code, article forty?"

Lin Wenyuan gave him a sharp, bright, quizzical look. Then, slowly, something shifted in his old face, and he smiled.

"Any pastoral guest of the realm," he recited, "who comes unarmed and under a white banner to the gate of the capital shall be received in the hall of the wards, and heard, before any sentence be passed upon him." His white brows lifted. "I had forgotten that one."

"It is rather neglected," said Li Xuan.

They came in on foot.

There were five of them, and they left their horses at the gate, and their bows, and their knives, and walked up the long marble hall in their rough furs and felt boots, with the dust of four hundred li on their clothes. They looked very small in that great gilded hall. At their head walked a young woman in a plain gray coat, with a single thick braid over her shoulder tied with a strip of white bone, and her face, in the light of the high windows, was lean and weather-browned and stiff as a drawn bow.

Behind her came an old woman on a bird-bone staff, and a young man with a scarred lip, and a huge, bearded man in a bear-skin coat who walked with his head down and did not once look up. And between them, with an expression of profound unease, the fifth, a boy of about ten, small and thin, with the same pale gray eyes as the girl.

Tuoba Yue stopped before the ring of stools. She looked at the thirty-six faces. She looked at Sergeant Shi, with his medals and his empty sleeve. She looked, last, at a small figure on a bench by the door with a lap-desk, and a brush behind his ear.

"You said," she said, in her flat, clear, accented Great Liang, "that there was more, if I came after the first snow."

"I did."

"It has not snowed yet." Her chin lifted. "I did not wish to be late."

There was a faint stir in the hall. A carter muttered. The midwife drew in a sharp breath.

Tuoba Yue stood quite still in the center of the great marble floor, a stranger and an enemy, in the middle of the court of the people whose fathers her fathers had burned.

"I am Tuoba Yue," she said. "Granddaughter of the Ash Khan. My grandfather brought two hundred thousand riders against the Wall, and the Wall’s sorcerers burned a hundred thousand in one night. We lost our fathers. You lost yours. I do not know whose grief is greater." Her voice did not shake. "I have come to ask for one thing. And I will leave, if you refuse, and I will not ride at your Wall again."

"Ask," said Grand Secretary Lin gravely.

"The empty land. East of the Wall. Four hundred li of thorn, and dry wells, and no one." She drew a breath. "The Marshal of the West has said that anyone who will plow it, and watch the Pass, may settle there. I have three hundred households. We are tired of being hungry. I would like to learn to plow."

A long silence followed.

"She is a Wilderness barbarian," said the carter at last, uneasily. "They will steal the grain."

"They will eat it," said the baker, to everyone’s surprise. "Which is what I do with mine."

"They killed our sons."

"We killed theirs," said Sergeant Shi.

He had stood up. He stood quite straight on his one good arm, in his medals, with his gray head high, and the whole hall turned to look at him.

"I held the Third Banner at Iron Pass for six winters," he said. His voice was rough. "I buried eleven hundred men in the frozen ground, and I did not once see a Horde rider that I did not want to kill. I do not say I would not have done it again." His one hand was clenched on the hilt of a sword he was no longer carrying. "But I have been told that a scholar with a broom went out on the Red Plain and swept the dead of both armies together, and folded their banners, and laid them with their skulls to the west."

He turned slowly, and looked at the young man by the door.

"I should like to think," said Sergeant Shi, "that if a scholar can do that, an old soldier can sit at the same table."

There was no sound in the hall at all.

Then, from the ring, the blind storyteller laughed, softly, and tapped his bamboo staff upon the floor, once, twice, three times, in the rhythm of an old song.

"The wards say aye," he said.

"Aye," said the baker. "Aye," said the midwife. A carter muttered it, then another. The woman with the slates said it very clearly. It went around the circle like a lamp passed from hand to hand, until all thirty-six had said it, and old Sergeant Shi, last of all, had to wipe his eyes with the heel of his one hand.

Tuoba Yue stood stiff as a post. Her pale eyes were bright.

From the doorway, Li Xuan took up the great green dragon seal in both hands and walked slowly down the long hall. The thirty-six elders watched him in silence. He laid a sheet of paper on the Grand Secretary’s lap-desk. It was a short decree, three lines, written in a clear, plain hand.

The Western Reaches, east of the Wall, are granted in perpetual lease to the Ash Horde and to any who will plow them, under the Marshal’s tally, with the consent of the Wards.

He pressed the seal.

The jade came down upon the paper with a small, firm, bell-like note.

In the depths of his spirit, six black strands came away from the Dragon-Vein Core at once, like a flight of rooks, and went up, and were gone.

Eleven, said the Mind Palace. And then, for a moment, in a voice that was almost trembling: Eleven.

The scarred young man, Temur, was weeping again, without shame. The old bone-speaker, Hulan, had sunk onto a stool, with her staff across her knees, and was singing, very low, in a cracked voice, a song that had no words. And the huge man in the bear-skin coat, who had not lifted his head once in all the long afternoon, drew the horse-tailed axe from his back, slowly, as one draws something very heavy.

He laid it on the marble floor, at the feet of the Ward Elders, and bowed to them, and said, in a rough, hoarse, halting Great Liang:

"My brother died for a vow. I am too old for another."

Sergeant Shi walked over, across the long marble floor, and offered him his one hand.

After a moment, the big man took it.

In the back of the hall, on a low wooden bench by the door, a thin young man in a patched blue robe picked up his brush, and, with a very steady hand, wrote it all down.