The court had been about to bury him, so his return caused what the records politely call rejoicing, and what an honest witness would call several senior officials needing to sit down.
Taizong came back changed in the way that survivors of audits are changed. He proclaimed amnesties. He released palace women. He reviewed the death sentences of the empire personally, four hundred cases, and sent the condemned home for a year to settle their affairs on their word to return — and the following autumn, the histories note, all four hundred came back to be executed, and he pardoned the lot, which is either the best story about trust ever recorded or the best story about paperwork. This book, characteristically, does not decide.
He repaid the water-seller first. Officials went to Kaifeng with a warehouse's worth of treasure and found Xiang Liang and his wife selling water and pottery in an alley, and the couple flatly refused the money — they had no memory of lending anything, and no intention of accepting an emperor's fortune for goods they could not recall shipping. The officials, who had orders, built a temple with it instead, in their name, and everybody's accounts balanced, which is what temples are for.
The Courier
The melons were harder. It is one thing to owe the underworld fruit and another to arrange delivery. The court posted notices: wanted, one volunteer, to die.
A man named Liu Quan answered.
He was a rich man from Junzhou, and his reason was this: he had scolded his wife, Li Cuilian, for giving her gold hairpin to a monk at the gate — scolded her for looseness, in front of the household, over a hairpin — and she was proud, and she hanged herself, and left him with two children and a house with a rope in it. He had stopped being interested in the house. When he saw the notice he settled his affairs, put a pair of melons on his head, took poison, and went down to the dark with the fruit balanced like a porter.
The Ten Kings received the melons with genuine delight, fruit being, as advertised, the one thing the underworld lacks. Then they looked up the courier, because the courts below look everyone up, and found two irregularities: Liu Quan had years of life left in him, and so had his wife.
Her body, however, said the reviewing judge, in the tone of a man consulting an inventory, has been in the ground a month, and is no longer serviceable. However. The Tang emperor's own sister, the lady Li Yuying, is due to die today. A fall in the garden. Fresh, undamaged, and of excellent family. He made a small note. We will lodge the wife there.
And that is what they did.
In the palace garden, the emperor's sister collapsed among her flowers and stopped breathing; and by evening she sat up, pushed away the weeping attendants, and demanded, in a market-town accent the lady Li Yuying had never possessed, to know where her husband was, and her children, and what all these strangers meant by handling her.
The court concluded madness. The emperor, three weeks back from the underworld himself, asked one question — the name of her husband — and on hearing Liu Quan, the melon courier sent for the man, and matched their stories, and handed his own sister's walking body to a merchant from Junzhou, with a dowry.
The couple went home to their children, wife and mother restored, in better health than ever, and the text calls it a reunion and moves on. It moves on a little quickly. Somewhere in the palace a family had buried the lady Li Yuying that same week, in a coffin containing, by then, no one in particular; and what they were told, and what they made of it, is not recorded. The book is busy.
The accounts of the dark all balance.
It is only the living
who are left holding a remainder.
The Priest
That left the mass. The Grand Mass of Land and Water, for the ferrying of the unmourned dead — the ghosts of the bridge, the men with their hands out. It required a chief priest of perfect conduct, and the empire was combed for one, and the name that came back, from every list, was a young monk of the Golden Mountain: Xuanzang.
Here the 1592 text pauses and gives him a résumé, and the résumé is a poem, and the poem is twelve lines long. His father took first place in the examinations; bandits on a river; a birth in hiding; a baby set afloat; a monastery; a vengeance, brought in full when he was grown. Twelve lines. Later editors of this book found that indecently brief for a hero and wrote him an entire inserted chapter of backstory, orphaning and river-drifting and revenge at length, and if you have read this story before, that is the version you know. It is not in the oldest book. In the oldest book the man who will walk to the edge of the world arrives the way monks actually arrive: quietly, with a good record, out of nowhere in particular.
We follow the oldest book. Twelve lines, and here he is.
was young, mild, and by every account in the text so beautiful that crowds turned in the street, which will be a recurring logistical problem. He had refused office, refused marriage, and memorised more scripture than men twice his age. Taizong appointed him chief of the mass, and he bowed, and took the platform, and for thirty-five days, before the emperor and the court and an enormous crowd, he preached the redemption of the dead.
He was, by all accounts, superb.
He was also, though nobody present could have known it, preaching from the small basket. On the thirty-fifth day, two scabby travelling monks pushed to the front of the crowd, and the older one looked up at the beautiful young man on the platform, and interrupted the Grand Mass of the empire with a question, asked loudly, in the voice of a woman who already knows the answer: