The New Patron

In the western county, the city god temple had stood for years without a proper god. The old statue had cracked; the priests were old; the worshippers had begun, half-jesting, to pray anywhere but there. Then, in the autumn after Song's death, things began to change.

The local magistrate dreamed one night that a young scholar in a dark blue robe came to his hall, bowed, and announced himself as the newly appointed tutelary of the county. He asked that the temple be swept, the tablet set upright, and the annual offerings restored. The magistrate, a pious man, rose at dawn and went himself to see the place.

He found it exactly as the dream had described, but for one thing: there was no tablet. He ordered a master carver to make one, and, on a hunch, sent messengers to Song's village to ask the dead scholar's name. When the name came back, the magistrate wrote it himself in the proper characters and set it in its place.

From that day the temple prospered. Merchants whose cases were at a standstill came to pray and found, within the week, a just decision. A farmer whose child had been taken by fever dreamed that a young doctor in a dark robe gave him a simple herb; the child recovered. The stories spread, and the temple's roof, which had leaked for ten years, was mended by voluntary hands.

Song's father came, as he had been told to do, on the first day of every month. He was an old man now, and the walk was long; but he went, and he burned his incense, and he told his son, in a low voice, the small news of the lane. Once, in the half-dream of the incense smoke, he heard his son's voice, very gentle, say, "Father, go home and rest. I am well."

His wife did not remarry. She lived quietly in the house with the old man, and she, too, dreamed sometimes: of a lamp in a familiar window, and a figure waiting for her to speak. She never told the dreams to anyone. She kept the inkstone her husband had used on the night of his examination, and used it, on the anniversaries, to write a short letter to him.

Years later, a traveler passing through the western county heard the story and wrote it down. He noted, with a scholar's surprise, that the exam which had decided the scholar's fate had not been the one he had sat for on earth; it had been the one he had not expected, on a paper no living hand had graded.

The moral, when the traveler came to it, was a quiet one. The world rewards the plausible; the next world, it seems, rewards the real. A man may fail every exam that men set him and yet pass the only one that matters, if he has, in the dark of his own house, quietly done the things that no one will ever praise him for.

The temple of the western county stands to this day, or so the story runs, and the tablet of the scholar Song is still there, dark with incense. His father's name is forgotten; his wife's name is forgotten; but the office he was given on that pale, starless evening is held by his memory, and the people of the county still light a candle there when they have a wrong they cannot lay before a mortal court.

So the examination that began as a dream ended, as the best dreams do, by becoming a fact. The judges of the underworld, it seems, have better lists than the examiners on earth.