The first watch. Old Sun is striking the clapper tonight. I can tell. His clapper is softer than the others, s…
The first watch. Old Sun is striking the clapper tonight. I can tell. His clapper is softer than the others, soft with a tremor. It was not always so. He used to strike it heavy and crisp, but after that day he never could again.
One knock, then another. Old Sun walks slowly, yet the sound still drifts farther and farther away. Only he never glances at the lattice windows of this hall. His eyes are blank, like a well filmed over with autumn mist. Mine are the same. We were both soaked through in that rain.
It was the autumn of Qianyou Year 1. The rain was brutal, pounding the palace tiles as if Heaven itself were beating a drum to cry injustice. Inside the hall, the silence was worse. The officials stood packed together like a dark forest. Their eyes were set high; their hearts were buried low.
They all knew why Lord Li died. He died for being loyal and straight. He died for repaying a debt. He died for the calamity of factional strife. But once the imperial verdict came down, his death needed a different cause.
"He conspired against the state, secretly allied with traitors and villains, and plotted rebellion."
Each word drove him into the mud. No one said a thing. No one could. When wind and rain demand that bamboo bend, it can only bend until it breaks. Everyone in the hall watched it bend, watched it snap, watched it swept away in the mire. Then they turned in silence and opened their umbrellas.
I had one too. I gripped the handle so hard my nails bit in. In the end, I did not take that step forward.
So Lord Li's sigh seeped into the air above this palace, no different from how the music of every grand ceremony rises and fades.
The rain kept falling, drop after drop, striking the bricks more clearly than Old Sun's clapper does now. I was not wrong. I was a lowly palace attendant. I could not even hold up the half inch of sky above my own head, let alone argue a case already decided.
For two years I have muttered this to myself every night, like a charm to stay alive. It cannot hold back the dream. In the dream, the rain is heavy and never stops.
Last month I drank with Old Sun. The wine had gone cold when he said, out of nowhere, "Lord Li... used to laugh at my clapper the most." Then he laughed, and it sounded worse than crying.
He used to say a man should live so he would not shame his ancestors' tablets. Now he only says the wine is cold and needs warming. We have both learned to drink cold wine and speak warm words.
Drop by drop, that rain has seeped on for years, from the cracks in the bricks outside, onto this hall's floor, and into my bones. And still I write. These words will be eaten by insects, buried in dust, perhaps never seen.
So why do I write? For myself? For those who come after?
I do not know. I only know I am cold. The moonlight spills over the bricks at my feet, but it cannot reach me. Not tonight. Not on the many nights before. Not on the many nights to come.