Chapter 54: Ninety-Nine Slips

The bamboo grew on the south slope of the mountain, in a thin gray-green grove that had never been cut.

It was Guo Qing who knew where. He knew everything about the growing things of the sect, the way a man knows who has spent ten years of his life gathering plants for pills. He led them there on the morning of the third day after the ledger, thirty disciples and an old Marshal and a donkey, along a path of frozen mud between dark pines, and stood at the edge of the grove with his arms folded and his round face unusually grave.

"It is a very old grove," he said. "The First Sweeper planted it. They say that it hears."

"Hears what?" asked Yun Tianxiao.

"What is said to it." Guo Qing looked at the bamboo, and the bamboo, in the still, cold air, seemed very slightly to lean. "I would be polite, if I were you."

Li Xuan said good morning to it.

He asked, quite formally, whether he might take ninety-nine pieces. He explained that he should cut only from the oldest stalks, and leave the young, and that he should leave a bowl of tea at the root of every one. He did not know why. It seemed the right thing to say. When he had finished, the whole grove let out a long, soft, rustling breath, like a congregation settling in its seats, and it was Gu, of all people, who took off his hat.

They cut for the whole morning.

They cut ninety-nine lengths, each a forearm long and a thumb thick. They split them, and planed them, and smoothed the edges with fine sand, and laid them out on a long board in the Archive in rows. They were pale and clean and smelled faintly of green. Li Xuan walked down the rows, running his finger along each, and each one seemed to him to be waiting.

"Ninety-nine," said Elder Fang, who was counting.

He had come up that morning, without being asked, with an abacus in one hand and a ledger in the other, and had stood in the great door looking at the floor. He had said nothing. Li Xuan had said: I find that I need someone to count. And the old steward had gone very red, and then very white, and had come in, and sat down at a small desk in a corner, and begun to count bamboo.

He was doing it with great and terrible thoroughness.

"Ninety-nine," he said, again, and made a small, firm mark. "No more, no fewer. I have counted them twice."

"Thank you, Elder."

"It is not," said Elder Fang stiffly, "a favor."

"No," said Li Xuan. "It is an appointment. I should like you to be the Registrar of the Third Terrace. It carries no salary. It has a very uncomfortable stool."

The old man stared at him.

Then, with a short, jerky, almost angry movement, he turned back to his abacus, and bent his head over it, and for a long time he did not say anything. But the beads clicked very softly, and very fast, and once or twice, his thin hand was seen to pass over his eyes.

He ground the ink at noon.

It was the first time that he had used the Inkstone for anything but looking at. He set it on the desk, on a flat square of gray silk, and took up a stick of the black pine-soot that Guo Qing had found him in the sect’s store, and began, slowly, to grind.

The little pool in the hollow of the stone did not seem to change. It lay there, clear and black and still. But as the stick moved, in slow circles, the stone grew warm under his hand, and a faint sweet smell of resin and rain rose from the surface, and something stirred in the quiet of the hall. The scrolls, on their shelves, stopped humming. The lamp-flame stood up very straight.

It carries a little of what the writer meant, the Palace had said.

He dipped the brush.

He did not hurry. He looked, for a long moment, at the first of the ninety-nine slips, a bare pale strip of bamboo lying on the silk, and he thought of nine hundred and ninety-nine steps and a poem. He thought of a line that he had read, on the seventeenth, in the dark, by lantern-light, and had not at the time understood.

Take nothing that you cannot carry.

He wrote it.

It was only a line. It took a single breath, in the Founder’s hand, in clear black ink, down the length of the slip. But when the last stroke was done, and he lifted the brush, a small cold wind went through the hall. The ink did not dry. It shone, wet and bright, with a faint inner light, and the bamboo beneath it grew heavy.

He lifted the slip.

It was nearly impossible. It weighed as much as a block of lead. His hand shook with the effort, and a thin cold sweat broke out upon his brow, and for a moment he thought that he should drop it. Then the weight eased. It became, quite gradually, only the weight of a thing that has been given a purpose.

"It will not be heavy," he said, a little breathless, "unless someone tries to carry something that is not his."

Gu, in the shadows, with his arms folded and a wary light in his eye, said: "I do not understand."

"It is a law," said Li Xuan. "It is the Stair’s law. The poem says: Take nothing that you cannot carry. But I think that it is only a half. The other half is Keep nothing that you cannot return." He laid the slip down. "If a man comes up the stair carrying what is not his, a purse he has stolen, a name he has taken, a life that he has not paid for, it will grow heavier at every step."

"How heavy?"

"As heavy as what he owes."

The silence in the great hall was complete.

"Ninety-nine slips," said Ji Ling’er, from the stair, quietly, "and a poem."

"A great many lines," said Li Xuan. "I think that it will take me five days."

"You have three."

"Then I had better begin."

He wrote for three days and three nights.

He wrote at the desk in the great hall, in the golden light of the lamp that had never gone out, with the Inkstone warm under his hand and the scrolls humming softly on the shelves. He wrote one line to a slip. He wrote them in order, as they came on the stair, and as the Palace read them to him in the jade hall of his spirit. The disciples carried them out, one at a time, as each was finished, and laid them in a long wooden rack by the door to dry. The wet ink never dried. But after a while, they began to sing.

It was a very faint sound. It was the sound of a great many small, clear, bell-like notes, ninety-nine of them, each a little different, rising and falling in the dim air of the hall like the voices of a choir a long way off.

On the second night, Ye’er brought him a bowl of soup, and he did not notice. On the third morning, Aunt Liu stood over him with a needle and a look until he drank it. By dusk his hand was cramped to the elbow and there were black rings about his eyes, but the last slip lay finished upon the silk, and the poem, from first line to last, was written.

He sat looking at it, and could not at first think what to do.

Then Yun Tianxiao, at his elbow, said in a rather cracked voice: "I will carry them."

He had been there for three days. He had cut the bamboo and carried the ink and swept the floor and fetched the soup. He had not asked for anything. He stood in the lamplight with his bandaged eye and his torn blue robe and his long honest face, looking, for the first time since Li Xuan had known him, not like a young master at all, but like a boy with a job.

"All ninety-nine," he said. "Along the mountain. Wherever you say."

"I think that I should like them set in a ring," said Li Xuan slowly. "Around the base of the mountain. A hundred paces apart, along the road, on the paths, in the pine-woods. Wherever a man might come who is not welcome." He rose, with an effort. "They must be set in the earth to the depth of a hand, with a bowl of tea at the foot. It is a courtesy. I do not know why."

"It is the grove," said Guo Qing, quietly. "It will want to know where they have gone."

They set them at dusk.

They went out in pairs, thirty disciples and the old Marshal and the girl with the ice-sword, with lanterns and trowels and bowls of cold tea, and they spread out through the pine-woods in the failing light, and Li Xuan stood at the edge of the Terrace and watched the lanterns go. They moved down the slope like a slow spill of fireflies. They stopped. They knelt. They were very small and very far away. And as each slip was set in the earth, a faint point of silver light bloomed in the dark, and the next, and the next, until the whole base of the mountain was ringed, in a long, thin, glowing circle, like a necklace of pearls laid on black velvet.

It rang. It hummed. It was very faint. But he could hear it from the Terrace, a high, sweet, ninety-nine-voiced note, as of a very great many people, a long way off, singing the same word.

He sat down on the top step, very tired, and put his chin on his hand.

"A beautiful night," said a dry voice behind him.

He did not turn his head. "Elder Fang."

The old steward came and stood beside him, with his ledger under his arm and his thin, dry, gray face lit by the silver glow. He had not said a word in some time. When he spoke again it was in a rather careful voice, as of a man picking his way across a stream.

"The scouts have come back," he said. "The Master has sent me to tell you. It is the Blood-Blade. They are on the road. Three hundred of them, and their Sect Master, and a man in gray with green runes on his neck." He swallowed. "They will be at the foot of the stair by sunrise."

"A day early."

"Yes."

"Then they do not mean to wait for the new moon." Li Xuan looked down at the ring of silver light, at the dark, still, listening mountain. "I should like to send them a bowl of tea."

Elder Fang gave a short, startled sound, not quite a laugh.

"The Third Custodian," he said slowly, "wrote in the margin of the accounts, forty years ago, that you would be very odd."

"I have been told that a number of times lately."

"He said that you would be the only person he had ever met who was not afraid of a debt." The steward turned, and looked at him. In the light of the glowing circle, his pinched face was strangely gentle. "I did not understand. I think, now, that I begin to."

He bowed, stiffly, from the waist, as one bows to an equal, and went away down the dark stair to tell the Sect Master that the custodian had finished his work.