Master Bao was sick in winter, the winter Wei Liang was eleven.
It was not the coughing sickness or the river fever — those moved through Qinghe fast and with obvious intention. It was something slower: a general failure of energy, a unwillingness of the body to be as available as it had been, a quality of tiredness that sleep did not resolve. He did not collapse. He did not require emergency attendance. He simply, for two weeks, did not leave his bed.
Wei Liang visited every afternoon. He brought food that was easier than cooking — rice cakes, soft bean paste, broth from the noodle stall at the south market — and he read aloud from whichever book Master Bao indicated. Master Bao corrected his pronunciation and intonation from the bed, which was either impressive or proof that recovery was imminent, depending on whether you found it annoying or reassuring.
On the fifth day, Wei Liang arrived to find Master Bao propped up against the headboard with the window open despite the cold, looking at the river with the expression of someone who had decided to have a different kind of conversation.
"Sit down," Master Bao said.
Wei Liang sat on the low stool he had relocated to the bedroom for the duration.
"I was twenty-eight when I took my posting," Master Bao said. He had not been preambled toward this. He was simply starting in the middle, which was his way when he had decided something was worth saying. "Imperial examiner, third-tier administrative district. It was what I had worked for. It was what I thought I wanted."
Wei Liang said nothing. He had learned that Master Bao in this mode needed only the evidence of being listened to.
"I was good at it," Master Bao said. "That is not modesty or its inverse. I was simply good at it — the evaluation, the judgment, the clarity of standards. I thought this was the thing. Being good at a useful thing." He paused. "The first year I administered my district, I rejected forty-three petitions from families seeking sect recruitment allowances for their children. The petitions were rejected because the children did not meet the threshold. This was correct, by every standard available to me." He looked at his hands. "I do not know what happened to those forty-three families. I never knew, and the records did not track it."
Wei Liang thought about this. He thought about the sect examiner who had come to Qinghe when he was younger, who had not looked up from his ledger. He thought about Hao Jin, who was going to be tested in a year. He thought about himself.
"What did you do?" Wei Liang asked.
"I did my job," Master Bao said, "for six years. I was good at my job. I was correct by every standard, consistently." He paused. "Then I realized that correct by every standard is not the same as right, and that being good at a system that has a certain shape does not make you responsible for the shape. But it does make you part of it." He turned his cup in his fingers. "I decided I was not comfortable with that."
"So you left."
"So I left," Master Bao agreed. "I did not have a plan. I had some books and some savings and a conviction that being correct was not enough of a reason to continue." He looked at Wei Liang. "Was this wise?"
Wei Liang thought about it seriously. "I don't know," he said. "It seems honest."
"Honesty is a smaller virtue than people claim," Master Bao said. "It is necessary but it is not sufficient. But yes. It was honest." He drank the broth Wei Liang had brought. "I have been in Qinghe twelve years. I have read more here than I read in my posting. I have thought more. Whether I have been more useful — I cannot say. I have been less certain of my usefulness, which might be the same thing."
"You've been useful to me," Wei Liang said.
Master Bao looked at him. The afternoon light through the window was thin and cold.
"Yes," he said. "I know." He said it with a weight that Wei Liang could not fully locate. As if useful to you specifically was the answer to a question he had been asking for a long time.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "When you are sick and you lie in a room and the river is outside, you think about what your life adds up to. Not dramatically — practically. The way you'd add up accounts." He paused. "I find it adds up to more than I expected. The reading helped. You helped."
Wei Liang looked at the window and the strip of river. "I'm glad," he said. He said it plainly, because it was plain.
"Read to me," Master Bao said. He indicated a volume on the bedside stack. "The one with the blue spine. Start at the third section."
Wei Liang read. Master Bao corrected his intonation twice. On the third correction, his voice was slower, softer.
On the fourth correction, it had stopped.
Wei Liang kept reading. He read for another hour. When he left, Master Bao was asleep in the afternoon light, the river outside going south, the books all around him exactly as they always were.