Meanwhile, outside Chang'an, two friends were walking home drunk: Zhang Shao, a fisherman, and Li Ding, a woodcutter. Neither of them matters and both of them start everything.
They were having the argument that fishermen and woodcutters have had since the invention of rivers, about whose life was better, and they conducted it in verse, at length, trading poems the way other men trade punches. The 1592 text gives the whole bout. It goes ten rounds. You are getting the judge's decision only: a draw, blue water against green hills, both men lying happily about how little they need.
Then, at the fork where they parted, the fisherman said the thing he should not have said out loud.
You talk about luck, he said. I don't use luck. There's a fortune-teller on the West Gate street, Yuan Shoucheng. I bring him a carp a day, and he tells me where to put my nets. I've never missed a haul. Never once.
Under the river Jing, a patrolling yaksha heard it, and took it straight down to the : somebody on the shore is selling the location of every fish in the river, at a rate of one carp per day.
The Bet
The Dragon King's first instinct was to go up and kill everyone involved, which his advisers talked him down from, on the grounds that the fisherman had said fortune-teller and you cannot eat your way out of a fortune-teller. Investigate first, they said. So he took the shape of a scholar in white and went to the West Gate street.
Yuan Shoucheng's shop was doing brisk business. The dragon pushed to the front and asked, with the elaborate courtesy of a man being rude, for tomorrow's weather.
Rain tomorrow, said Yuan.
When, exactly?
Clouds gather at the hour of the dragon. Thunder at the serpent. Rain from noon, ending at the sheep. Three feet, three inches, and forty-eight drops.
The dragon laughed for a while.
You see the joke he thought he was in. He was the Dragon King of the Jing. Rain in this district was not predicted, it was performed, by him, on written orders. Asking him tomorrow's rain was like asking an actor how the play ends.
If it falls as you say, I'll pay you fifty taels, he said. If it doesn't — if it's off by an hour or short by a drop — I smash this shop and run you out of the gates.
Agreed, said Yuan, and went back to his tea.
The dragon went home extremely pleased, and was met at the palace door by a messenger from Heaven, in gold, holding a decree. Rain over Chang'an tomorrow. Clouds at the dragon hour. Thunder at the serpent. Rain from noon to the sheep. Three feet, three inches, forty-eight drops.
The palace went silent while he read it.
How, he said, at last, to nobody.
The Edit
His advisers found the way out for him, and it is a very small way out, and this book is about how small it is. Nothing says you cannot deliver the rain a little differently. Shift the hours by one. Hold back a few inches. The decree will have been substantially obeyed. The fortune-teller will be technically wrong. Who audits rain?
So he did it. He moved the rain back an hour and delivered three feet even, minus the odd drops. Then he put on his scholar's body again, and went to the shop, and smashed it, door and sign and table, and stood in the wreckage enjoying himself.
I know what you are, said Yuan, who had not left his chair. You are the Dragon King of the Jing, and yesterday you altered a decree of Heaven — the hour and the count both. It is already filed. The Human Court has been assigned the execution. Tomorrow, at the noon hour, on the Dragon-Slicing Block, the minister Wei Zheng will cut your head off.
The dragon looked down at himself, standing in a shop he had just smashed, in a body that was a costume, holding a bet he had won by forgery.
Then he was on his knees in the splinters.
Save me. You knew the rain. You know the way out. Save me and I —
I can't save you, said Yuan. Wei Zheng is a minister of the Tang. Only his emperor could keep him occupied at noon. Go and beg Taizong. And I would go politely.
Heaven counts drops.
The file was open before the rain hit the ground.
The Dream
That night the Emperor Taizong of the Tang, second sovereign of the dynasty, master of the largest empire on the earth, woke inside his own dream to find an enormous old god kneeling on his bedroom floor.
Save me, it said. It had been saying it for some time.
Who are you? Save you from what?
Your Majesty is a true dragon. I am a guilty one. I am the Dragon King of the Jing, and Heaven has ordered my death tomorrow noon, and the headsman is your own minister, Wei Zheng. He is yours. Command him somewhere else at noon. One hour. I am asking for one hour.
And the emperor, who was a soldier and had watched men beg before and had a fixed policy of not enjoying it, said what any king says to make a large weeping thing get off the floor:
Very well. If the headsman is my minister, then you may set your heart at rest.
The dragon knocked its head on the dream-floor and was gone. Taizong woke at dawn with the sentence still in his mouth, and no idea yet that he had just co-signed for a condemned prisoner in a court whose rules he did not know, whose reach he had never tested, and whose filing system, unlike his own, had no bottom.
He called for his ministers, and made sure the summons included Wei Zheng.