The Twin Cities could afford to breathe more easily until autumn. They had defied A-ku’s horde for six critical months.
Supplies remained plentiful in the huge underground granaries beneath the Prefecture. Those who had cursed the Pacification Commissioner’s nephew, Wang Bai, for impoverishing the whole province, now marvelled at his foresight.
*
One morning a work party of women gathered round two wheelbarrows in Apricot Corner Court. They were five in number, a lucky figure: Madam Cao, Old Hsu’s Wife, Widow Mu and her daughter, Lan Tien, as well as one who hovered on the edge of the group. While her companions exchanged jokes about watery breakfasts, this fifth woman’s expression remained stiff and aloof. Her clothes were outlandishly large for they had been borrowed from Madam Cao. Her attention was on the street, as though she feared someone might witness her disgrace. The women ignored her and noticed everything she did.
‘We should go now,’ said Madam Cao.
Lu Ying hung back a moment, fiddling with her peasant’s clothes. She thrust back a straying lock of hair beneath her broad-brimmed, conical hat. When she looked up, the wheelbarrows had already left Apricot Corner Court. A long-handled hoe lay by her feet. Did they expect her to carry it? Madam Cao had told her she must justify her rations like everyone else in Apricot Corner Court. It was both a test and reproach.
Lu Ying flushed. Oh, one who had been weighed down by the richest brocade and jade could carry anything! Nor would she be shamed now. She made an exceptionally attractive figure in plain clothes – like a new Mulan or other patriotic heroine forced to set aside her silks. Then, despite her intention to be brave, Lu Ying felt something close to despair. Why deceive herself? No one would notice her, except to mock. Perhaps it was better to be invisible like all poor, toiling folk. Yet Lu Ying feared her jade green eyes would always draw unwanted attention.
Picking up the hoe, she shuffled after the other women. They were some way ahead. She followed with downcast eyes, occasionally glancing up at the trundling wheelbarrows. Her bound feet struggled to find balance as she carried her hoe. By the time they reached the Water Gate of Morning Radiance she was sweating and distressed. Nevertheless she met Madam Cao’s look of concern blandly. That was a kind of triumph.
More and more she had begun to view Cao with the distaste once reserved for Wang Ting-bo’s First Wife. Lu Ying leant on the hoe, shoulders and arms aching. A sergeant descended from the Water Gate’s parapets and nodded courteously.
‘So you meant what you told me, Madam Cao,’ he said, examining the other women, who burrowed their gaze into the ground.
‘Indeed, sir,’ said Cao. ‘If you will allow it.’
He pursed his lips.
‘It’ll do no harm. From what you say it might even do good.
But at the first sign of trouble get back inside double-quick.’
Madam Cao bowed respectfully.
The procession of wheelbarrows advanced into a brick-lined tunnel cut through the earth walls, emerging on a thin strip of wasteland between rampart and river. The soldier on guard gestured Lu Ying through, then bolted the iron-fretted door behind them.
Every place has neglected borderlands. Ground where glorious blooms might unfurl given a chance. Lu Ying realised this as they surveyed the soil before them. She recollected one of Wang Ting-bo’s concubines, a plain, unsophisticated girl with broad thighs. She had miscarried in her sixteenth year after the Governor’s attentions and been ignored ever after. Yet Lu Ying had always feared that girl, sensing her ripeness. Once she asked him about her and he had replied that her smell was displeasing. Lu Ying, with a woman’s insight, had known he was a fool. Here was one who would surely bear the sons he craved.
Now, as Lu Ying smelt the rank, peaty earth before them, she recognised the same potential. It was an unlovely strip of land, high with weeds and wild peonies.
Madam Cao turned to them.
‘We clear today,’ she said, mildly. ‘And plant tomorrow.’
Hours of labour lay in between. Lu Ying was directed to hoe, yet found her lotus feet could not grip properly as she turned the soil. Tears of humiliation stung her cheeks, tactfully ignored by the women alongside her. They advanced across the earth in a line until she lagged behind. Soil rich with roots and grubs revealed itself to her hoe. The other women began to sing but she did not join in. Their words were strange to her. They sang as though born to it:
Chop, chop, we clear the elms
And pile branches on the bank.
He neither sows nor reaps.
How has our lord five hundred sheaves?
He neither traps nor shoots.
How do badger pelts adorn his courtyards?
Those lords, those handsome lords,
Need not work for a bowl of food.
Lu Ying listened attentively. The ancient words were vulgar. She must not be moved by them, lest she became a peasant herself.
When she glanced up, she found that Madam Cao had not joined in either. For a moment their eyes met, sharing a secret knowledge of being raised for a different place in this floating world. Then Cao cleared her throat politely and the singers fell silent.
‘Dr Shih says he needs mugwort and bletilla tubers. Also, big thistle and ginseng. For those herbs suppress bleeding.’
Her gentle tone held great authority. How could it be otherwise? Of the four women she addressed, three lacked husbands, unless you counted the ghost of Mu’s spouse – as his widow obviously did.
‘I will ask my husband to advise us when it is best to sow,’ declared Widow Mu. ‘He will visit me in my dreams tonight.’
‘We shall plant them as soon as the soil is bare,’ said Cao.
‘And harvest them in late summer and early autumn, when the moon is auspicious.’
Old Hsu’s Wife laughed sadly.
‘In the autumn there’ll be plenty of bleeding for your herbs to cure,’ she said. ‘So we’d better grow plenty.’
The five women toiled beneath the ramparts of Nancheng.
The air swirled with gnats and heat. As they worked Lu Ying occasionally looked around, for she felt exposed outside the city ramparts. Further upstream, the Mongols were raising two fortresses to prevent supplies from reaching the Twin Cities by water. She could see earthen walls and hundreds of slaves swarming like ants. Across the broad river lay Fouzhou, smaller than its sister-city. It was only recently that General A-ku had established a comprehensive line of siege-works around it, declaring he considered Fouzhou to be the lips hiding Nancheng’s teeth, and that he would strip it to the gums.
Everyone in the city knew that story. Spies and treacherous agitators circulated it at the great general’s order.
*
As Lu Ying’s hoe severed stems and turned sticky soil, her thoughts turned over an unexpected meeting that had occurred a few days earlier, while Madam Cao and Dr Shih were both away from Apricot Corner Court.
A pounding on the front door of the medicine shop had made Lu Ying rise in alarm. There are many ways of knocking on a door. This knock was heavy with its own importance. She waited for Apprentice Chung to answer until it became obvious he was away with his master and that only she and Lord Yun were in residence. Lu Ying hesitated, wondering whether she should beg the old man to greet their caller, but when she checked, his room stood empty. No doubt he was hiding somewhere in Apricot Corner Court, as he often did these days, peering and muttering to himself.
Bang. Bang.
Whoever was knocking clearly had urgent business here. Lu Ying hurried from her room to the deserted medicine shop, concealing her face behind an elegant fan depicting the Moon Goddess, Cheng-he, on painted silk.
‘Who is that?’ she called out.
A moment’s silence was followed by a harsh, official-sounding voice: ‘Open the door at His Excellency Wang Ting-bo’s command! I bear a message for the Lady Lu Ying!’
Abruptly her fear melted into incredulity, then exhilaration.
With trembling hands she undid the heavy wooden bolts. A single servant stood in the street, his expression more vexed than respectful.
‘You took a long time to answer,’ he muttered.
Lu Ying shrank back. This was not how she had imagined Wang Ting-bo would summon her to back to Peacock Hill!
Where was the awe and reverence she craved? The elaborate ceremony such a summons naturally required? Instead the servant thrust a letter – not even a bound scroll – into her hands and turned on his heels with the curtest of bows.
Lu Ying hurriedly examined the street for witnesses to his insolence. A line of mules laden with military supplies was being led down North Canal Street, drawing a crowd of urchins. One beast chose that moment to release a load of dung, provoking a fight amongst the urchins over who should claim such saleable fuel. Lu Ying hastily closed the street door, forgetting to bolt it behind her.
Then she opened the letter. The characters were tightly written – long, neat columns in such a precise hand that she suspected they had not been written by Wang Ting-bo. He was well known for his careless style of writing; at least that was what people who understood such things whispered in the women’s quarters. Lu Ying’s own ability to read was so feeble, worse even than her writing, that she had never been able to judge for herself.
Then she had another thought. Why shouldn’t Wang Ting-bo employ a scribe for his most intimate business?
Would it not make his private concerns somehow more official, and so enhance her status upon her return to Peacock Hill?
Lu Ying retained this comforting idea as she tried to decipher the dense script. Certainly she recognised her own name several times in the document; beyond that she was less certain, and fell back to tapping her leg with the letter.
Of course she might ask Dr Shih or Madam Cao to read it for her, but she did not trust them. What if Wang Ting-bo was not restoring her to her former position as she hoped? What if he was reproaching her for sending no splendid presents to regain his affection?
Lu Ying bit her plump, bud-like lips and used the letter as a fan to cool her forehead.
No, she must not ask them. Already Madam Cao held her in contempt after her attempt to borrow a little
cash
, an episode she bitterly regretted now. She would find another person, one she could trust.
Then Lu Ying realised there was no one she could trust. Not a single creature in this wide world. She had no one; no one but herself.
The thought dispirited her enough to stare desperately at the baffling characters, perched on a stool by the tall maple counter of the shop. Stray words floated through the mists of her ignorance:
cash, His Excellency, generous
– or was that
very generous
? She really could not be sure. But other characters were numbers, she felt quite certain, lots of different numbers. . .
Lu Ying was biting her lips again, so intent on the letter that she did not notice the unbolted door swing open and a tall, broad-chested figure step inside. When, at last, her glance flickered up and noticed him, she cried out in alarm.
The soldier watched her quizzically and bowed.
‘Lady Lu Ying,’ he said. ‘Forgive me for startling you.’
She reached for her silk fan depicting Cheng-he, but it was in her bedchamber. For a moment she used the letter to hide her face until an impulse, a desire for him to look at her, to see her just as she was, made her lower it.
‘Captain Xiao!’ she exclaimed, twisting the letter in her hands. ‘I trust you are quite well?’
His tired face remained grave.
‘Quite well,’ he said. ‘But where is my brother? And Honoured Sister-in-law?’
Lu Ying sensed implications behind his use of the word
honoured
.
‘Not here,’ she said in an over-bright voice. ‘I have no idea when they will return.’
‘Ah.’
He looked at her sharply, then glanced at the floor.
‘What of Lord Yun?’ he asked. ‘I take it
he
is at home?’
Lu Ying coughed apologetically.
‘I assume so,’ she replied. ‘Though I could not find him earlier when I looked.’
‘I see. Then I must seek him out.’
Yet Captain Xiao seemed in no hurry to find the most important relative one can possess. He stood uncertainly in the middle of the shop lined with tightly sealed jars and burdened shelves.
‘Perhaps I shall wait for my brother first,’ he said.
Lu Ying watched him curiously. After a moment he appeared to recollect himself.
‘Please wait for me here,’ he said. ‘I have some questions to ask you. First I shall speak to Father.’
He was gone no longer than ten minutes. When he returned Lu Ying was waiting quite demurely on a stool in the medicine shop, having used the interval to apply kohl to her eyebrows and refresh her pale cheeks with a blushing powder. Yun Guang appeared decidedly ruffled as he entered the shop.
‘Is Lord Yun unwell?’ she asked
Yun Guang waved a casual hand, as though making light of her question.
‘A little,’ he muttered. ‘At least, I believe so. I found him in the tower room. It seems some loud knocking had disturbed him and he thought the enemy had come to take him back. . .but let us not mention it. Shih will know what medicine to give.’
‘Forgive me,’ said Lu Ying, ‘but Lord Yun often finds places where he can be concealed. There is a demon, or perhaps person, called Bayke. . .’
She let the name dangle. Guang shot her a quick glance.
‘Quite so. His fear is. . . a distressing sight.’
She detected the possibility of tears in his voice. This seemed so very far from proper for Captain Xiao that she hastened to divert them.
‘Commander Yun Guang,’ she found herself saying. ‘I have a request for you.’ Then she hesitated, caught in a bird’s nest of tangled vanities. ‘Please read this letter for me,’ she said in a quiet voice. She could tell he was surprised. ‘You see,’ she said.
‘I read less well than I would like, which is to say, hardly at all.’
It was difficult to interpret his grave silence. No doubt he viewed her as deficient, an imbecile. Her face coloured with conflicting emotions. Yet to her surprise he bowed.