Robe. Silk, silk thread, ruby bead. Green background embroidered with darker green leaves. A single red ruby beetle bead rests on a green leaf on the right arm.
Sleeping robe. Silk, muslin, and silk thread. Mulberry muslin edged with white silk, the archaic characters for “Restful Sleep” embroidered inside the collar.
Tunic. White fur, black fur, suede, and ivory. White fur striped with black along the sleeves. A pattern of waves has been shaved into the fur. The inside is lined with suede, and the throat closed with an ivory toggle.
“That’s a tooth.”
Chih and Almost Brilliant looked up as Rabbit came in with four small bowls on a tray. One was filled with fatty scraps that she set in front of Almost Brilliant, who flapped down from the rafters to peck at them with pleasure.
“A tooth?” asked Chih, touching the ivory carefully. It was smooth under their fingers and carved with curling lines that hurt their eyes when they looked at it too closely. The entire sealskin tunic was made with consummate skill, but it was easily as heavy on its own as any four of the silk dresses that were bundled in the cedar chest with it.
“Yes. Come eat some pounded rice, and I shall tell you what the empress told me.”
Chih came to sit across from Rabbit with the tray between them. They had not lost their wariness from the night before, but in daylight, Rabbit looked like so many of the lay sisters who were constantly in and out of the abbey, as much fixtures as the stone hoopoes that studded the walls or the smell of wood pulp being milled into sheets of paper.
The pounded rice was still warm and flavored with birch water, and the two of them ate companionably for a while, scooping the rice into their mouths with spooned fingers and cleaning them in the bowl of water. Rabbit rinsed her bowl neatly before setting it aside, and she smiled at the white seal-fur dress as if it were an old acquaintance spotted in the marketplace.
* * *
I suppose you have guessed by now that I am quite at home in this old place. It is true that my family is from this region, but when I was only five, the county sent me along with one hundred san of birch water, thirty young goats, and fifty caskets of orange dye to the capital. It was meant to be fifty-five caskets of dye, you see, and they hoped if they sent me along that the tax collectors would be forgiving.
I suppose they were, and I spent the next four years scrubbing the Palace of Gleaming Light, never raising my head. I got to know the palace by the baseboards, the wood of the floors, the smell of the paper screens, and the way that lamp oil burned all night, never letting the darkness approach His Most Divine Presence the Emperor of Pine and Steel, Emperor Sung.
I might have been a rabbit-toothed girl from the provinces, but I worked so well that when I was ten, I had been promoted to cleaning the women’s quarters. I was so proud when they gave me the veil that marked me as one of the servants of the inner house. If I could have written then, I would have written to my father and mother of how their daughter, veiled and wearing household green, was lined up along the Paulwonia Hall with two hundred others to greet the new empress from the north.
The royal household agency positioned us before dawn, prowling up and down the lines as nervously as cats and lashing out with their horsehair whips when we slouched or yawned. More than one girl fainted, but I was a strong thing, and I stood like a statue until past noon, when there was a great commotion in the courtyard. We knew from the snapping of banners and the shouts of the guards that the empress had arrived.
She did not come, as her late mother had once threatened, with a battalion of mammoths to bring down the walls of the Palace of Gleaming Light. Instead, she had come with only an honor guard that was barred from the inner palace, and so she walked down the long hallway to the court of the emperor all alone.
We had been scolded and smacked and told that if we raised our eyes to the future mother of the emperor we would be relegated to cleaning the kitchen refuse pits. I could not help myself, however, and I glanced up to see her pass by.
History will say that she was an ugly woman, but that is not true. She had a foreigner’s beauty, like a language we do not know how to read. She was barely taller than I was at ten, and built like an ox drover’s daughter. Her two long braids hung over her shoulders as black as ink, and her face was as flat as a dish and almost perfectly round. Pearl-faced, they call it where she came from, but piggish is what they called it here.
She walked past with her spine like one of these birch trees, and she wore this dress, which is as white today as it was then.
The seal that the dress was made from was killed by her brother on his first hunt. Patient as the unending ice itself, he had stalked it for days at the breathing holes where they come up, and when it rose, it was as large as a man. The toggle is one of its teeth, carved by her uncle. Her brother and uncle, whose names are now only spoken in the mortuary halls of Ingrusk, were killed just a year before, at the battle of Ko-anam Fords.
She would bring with her a wealth of salt, bushels of pearls, and enough whale oil to keep the palace alight for twenty years or more, one of the finest dowries ever to come to an emperor of Anh, but that was still a week away. When she first came to the Palace of Gleaming Light, In-yo was alone and empty-handed, wearing a splendid seal-fur dress that the ladies of the women’s quarters could only call strange and barbaric.
She never wore this dress again in the palace, but when the emperor sent her into exile, she asked me to pack it carefully. I was thirteen then, and it was my job to look after it. I packaged it so carefully between layers and layers of crisp paper, and every ten days I brought it out to brush away any possible moth eggs or larvae.
Even though there was a fashion for seal fur in the capital when In-yo became the empress in truth, there never was a dress like this one again. There could never be. It is beautiful, but every stitch bites into her history, the deaths she left behind her, and the home she could not return to.
Do you understand?
* * *
“I am not sure I do, grandmother, but I listen, and Almost Brilliant will remember.”
Rabbit flinched a little, as if she had forgotten herself. For a single faraway moment, she looked like something other than a simple servant woman, but it was there and gone so fast that Chih could not say for sure what it was.
“That is your calling, isn’t it? To remember and to mark down.”
“It is. Sometimes the things we see do not make sense until many years have gone by. Sometimes it takes generations. We are taught to be content with that.”
Rabbit tilted her head, looking at Chih carefully.
“Are you? Content with that, I mean?”
“After my novitiate, they sent me to the kingdom of Sen, where Almost Brilliant and I were to take an account of their summer water festival. We were just meant to be there to record populations, dances, fireworks, things like that, but on the ninth day of the festival, a brown carp cleared the final gate of the city’s dams and became a calico dragon. It twisted over the city, bringing down a month of holy rain, and then it was gone. Grandmother, I am very content.”
Rabbit smiled, standing to pick up the dishes and to offer Almost Brilliant a gentle stroke along her crest.
“Good.”
That night Chih dreamed of a man in a field of blinding white, waiting at a breathing hole with the patience of the damned for a seal to come up. In their dream, the man heard a call and then, with a smile on his round face, he turned and walked away, leaving his spear behind.