Ken Liu - The Wall of Storms

The cashima streamed into the Examination Hall, each presenting a pass to the guards for careful inspection. Each test taker was also patted down to be sure that the voluminous folds of the robes and the long sleeves of the wrap dresses did not conceal sheaves of paper filled with dense notes written in zyndari letters as tiny as the heads of flies or precomposed essays by some hired ghostwriter. No one was even allowed to bring in a favored brush or writing knife, or a good luck charm obtained at the Temple of Lutho or the Temple of Fithowéo—the Grand Examination Hall, after all, was a battlefield for scholars! The stakes of the Grand Examination were so high that the temptation to cheat was great, and Duke Coda was determined to run a flawless test.

Rin Coda read from the instructions as the examinees found their assigned stalls and settled in:

“For the next three days, your stall will be your home. You will eat in it, sleep in it, and use the chamber pot you find inside. If you must leave for any reason, you forfeit your place in this year’s exam, because we cannot permit the possibility of any outside contact.

“You will find in your assigned stall a scroll of fresh silk as well as scratch paper, brushes, ink, wax, and a writing knife. Your final composition must fit inside the wooden box in the upper right-hand corner of the desk with the cover closed, so plan your logograms carefully. Food will be brought to you three times a day, and two candles are provided for illumination at night.

“Do not try to communicate with any other examinee, whether by tapping on stall walls or passing notes or some other ‘creative’ method. Any such attempt will lead to immediate disqualification, and the proctors will escort you out of the Examination Hall.

“You have until sundown on the third day to complete your answer. I will issue a warning an hour before the end, but when I call time, you must already have the final composition inside the box, ready to be handed in. Do not try to beg for an extension.”

Rin paused and looked around: Close to a thousand pairs of eyes stared up at him, hanging on his every word. Paper was laid out before them; brushes were inked and poised; clumps of wax lay in dispensers. Rin smiled and basked in the significance of this moment.

He cleared his throat and continued, “This year’s essay topic has been chosen by the emperor himself.

“ ‘If you were the prime adviser to the Emperor of Dara, what is the one policy you would immediately advocate to improve the lives of the people of the Islands? Consider history as well as the future. Thoughts from the Hundred Schools of philosophy are welcome, but do not be afraid to offer your own views.’

“You may begin.”

For most of the examinees, the next three days would be recalled as among the most arduous in their lives. The Grand Examination was not merely a test of knowledge and skill of analysis, but also a trial of endurance and steadfastness of will and purpose. Three days was in fact much too long for one essay, and an examinee’s worst enemy was self-doubt.

Some went through all their scratch paper in drafts on the first day and had to make do with writing palimpsests; some began transcribing to silk too quickly and ended up cursing as they changed their minds about an inopportunely placed wax logogram that could not be shifted or dislodged without marring the silk; some stared at the wall for hours, trying to remember that one perfect reference from the epigrams of Ra Oji that was just on the edge of recall, slipping out of grasp like some silvery fish darting into the dark sea; some bit their nails to the quick as they tried to divine the emperor’s own thoughts on the question so as to craft an answer to flatter.

Six hours after the start of the test, the first examinee broke down. A fast writer, he had already finished his essay and begun to copy it onto the silk before he realized a fatal hole in his reasoning. Scraping off so much wax and starting over would ruin his calligraphy, but leaving the logograms in place would result in a flawed argument. Seeing years of effort wasted due to a bout of impatience was too much for him to bear, and he began to scream and cut himself with the writing knife.

The test administrators were prepared for this eventuality. Four proctors were at his stall in a moment and carried him out of the Examination Hall to be treated by a doctor and then sent back to his hostel to recover.

“Shall we wager on how many will make it through the full three days?” asked Cogo Yelu. “My guess is fewer than ninety out of a hundred.”

Rin Coda shook his head. “I’m glad that Kuni and I never had the ambition for the examinations.”

As the first day came to an end, the duke and the prime minister left their observation platform to retire for the night, but the proctors continued to patrol around the Examination Hall. Large oil lamps were lit in the cardinal directions, and the proctors manipulated the curved mirrors behind the torches to focus the light into bright beams that highlighted individual stalls at random in order to catch any attempts at cheating.

The examinees were now faced with a dilemma: Was it better to use up the two candles on the first night to finish up a good draft and leave the revisions and calligraphy to the next two days? Or was the more strategic choice to get a good night’s sleep on the first night and save the candles for an all-nighter the second night? As the hours ticked by, about half the stalls remained lit while the other half went dark, but sleep was hard to come by as neighbors rustled paper and shifted on their sitting mats, bright spotlights roamed overhead, and the fear that time was being wasted gripped the heart.

Three dozen more examinees had to be carried out of the hall during the night after breaking down under the pressure.

The second day and the second night were worse: The smell of unwashed bodies and leftover food and filled chamber pots assaulted the noses of the examinees, and some resorted to desperate measures to eke out every advantage. Some calculated how much wax would be needed for the final version of their answers and added the rest to the burning candles to stretch out the period of illumination; some, having run out of paper, began to use the walls of the stalls as scratch space; some heated the metal spoons that came with their bowls of soup and rubbed them against the other side of the silk to gently soften misplaced logograms so that they might be pried off without damaging the surface; some used the coconut juice they were served to thin out the ink and make it last longer; a few even started to carve their final drafts in the dark, feeling and shaping lumps of wax by touch.

The proctors noted each such instance of rule bending and came to consult with Rin and Cogo.

“I don’t think these count as cheating,” mused a frowning Cogo. “At least I don’t think the rules explicitly prohibit such acts.”

“We should give them a break,” said Rin magnanimously. “I’m pretty sure Kuni would be impressed by some of these tricks.”

A few dozen more examinees had to be removed as they fainted from exhaustion or lost control over themselves due to the intensifying stress. Clusters of empty stalls now dotted the Grand Examination Hall like calm atolls in a sea of activity.

Finally, as the sun rose on the third day, the examinees entered the final stretch of their competition. Almost all of them were now copying the finished essays onto silk, carving the wax logograms with meticulous attention to detail and inking the zyndari letters that served as glosses with flowing curlicues. The box for the final essay was very shallow, and the logograms had to be strategically placed on the scroll to allow it to be folded sufficiently flat to fit—each mountain needed a matching valley, and each exclamation required a subdued lament. The examination was not merely an exercise in reasoning and persuasion, but also a practical problem in three-dimensional geometry.