Just as the boy was stepping out of Clay Bottle Alley, he happened to cross paths with Zhigui, the maidservant of Song Jixin. Having seen that tall woman off to Gu Can's house, she had not hurried home at once but cut through the far end of the lanes to make a round of the little shops over in Apricot Blossom Lane. She had bought nothing, yet her mood was still light, and she came hopping and skipping along, blithe and buoyant.
A girl who had grown up among the wild waters of the countryside, carrying as she did a faint scent of green grass — her ways were bound to differ, after all, from the young ladies of the great mansions, raised deep within their high-eaved courtyards.
When she caught sight of the straw-sandaled boy, she did not, as was her custom, lower her eyes, quicken her pace, and brush past him sideways. Instead she stopped where she stood, fixed her gaze upon this neighbor she so seldom dealt with, seeming to want to speak yet holding back.
Chen Ping'an smiled at her, then set off at a jog past her shoulder, running faster and faster still.
Zhigui stood quietly at the mouth of Clay Bottle Alley and turned to look back. That shabby boy running off under the sun put her in mind of a stray cat thick with the will to live — scurrying here and there, no beauty to look at, but somehow never quite starving to death.
The girl was not well liked in town. Weighed down as she was by the eccentric temper of her young master, Song Jixin — whether going to draw water from the Iron Chain Well, or to the market to buy goods, or to pick up stationery for her young master — she always gave people a sense of being out of step with the world, with no playmates of her own age, and when she met an acquaintance she never had much to say. For a townfolk who doted on bustle and merriment, a girl like that was hard indeed to draw near.
In this respect, Chen Ping'an's lot was in truth rather like the maid Zhigui's. The one difference was that the boy, though equally sparing of words, was in his nature by no means off-putting. On the contrary — he was by disposition gentle and kind, his temper never carrying a sharp edge. It was only that his family had fallen on hard times, and he had gone early to the dragon kiln to earn his keep at the pottery wheel, that his dealings with the neighbors had never grown warm. And of course, the folk of Clay Bottle Alley did hold some nameless, inexplicable dread of the boy's birthday. In the village custom of the town, the fifth day of the fifth month was an "evil day," when the five venomous creatures crept forth together. That the boy had been born on such a day, and that his father and mother had died one after the other, left him early on the last lone shoot of his family — so it was only natural that folk should mutter over him in their hearts. Those of advanced years especially, who liked to gather beneath the old locust tree and share gossip, kept their distance from the boy of Clay Bottle Alley, and privately warned their own children to keep away from him as well. But each time a child, with a face full of reluctance, pressed the question of why down to the roots, the old folk could offer no answer at all.
Just then a tall, willowy figure emerged from a side lane and came to stand beside the girl. The maid Zhigui turned her head to look, said not a word, and simply walked on. The other turned and fell into step with her through Clay Bottle Alley. It was Teacher Qi, tutor of the village schoolhouse — the one and only man of learning in all the town, a true disciple of the Confucian school.
The girl did not slacken her pace, her face cold. "The two of us — if the well-water never offends the river-water, wouldn't that be best? And don't you forget, Master: some time past, you did hold the advantage of heaven's hour, earth's advantage, and man's accord all at once, and I, a lowly slave in the meanest of registers, could only swallow my anger and keep quiet. But of late — your school of the Dao, sitting away god knows how many ten-thousands of li from here — seems to have run into some trouble, has it not? So now, Master, you are the well-water, and I am the river-water!"
The unsought guest of Clay Bottle Alley, Teacher Qi, smiled faintly. "Wang Zhu — very well, let me go with the times and call you Zhigui for now. Zhigui, has it ever crossed your mind that, though you may be a creature favored by heaven and earth, born in accord with the hour — do you truly believe I have no art of suppression at my disposal? Or do you think that, thousands of years ago, when the four sages who show their heads but never their tails came together to this place and laid down their own rules in person, that they did so for idle talk, leaving not a single hidden move behind? In the end, you are but a frog peeping up from the bottom of its well. The height of the empyrean, the breadth of the earth — they lie a long way beyond the little patch of light that is all your well-mouth shows you."
The girl knitted her brows. "Teacher Qi, don't go trying to scare me with fine-sounding words. I'm not my young master Song Jixin. I've no interest in that lofty talk of yours, and I've never believed a word of it. The Master had best open the skylight and speak plain: whether we are to fight to the death, or to part in goodwill, I'll take it either way."
The middle-aged Confucian said slowly, "I counsel you: once you break free of this cage, do not press your luck beyond all bounds, do not drain the pond to catch the fish. That will profit no one. Above all — once you and he step together onto the path of cultivation, whether or not you bind yourselves as Dao-companions, you should sheathe your sharpness and hold back your high temper. You must not flaunt your pride and run rampant. This is no threat. Rather, on the point of parting, it is some true counsel from the depths of my heart — a kindly reminder, if you will."
By all rights the difference in their stations was as vast as heaven from earth, yet the maid Zhigui was utterly without servility, and at this moment her bearing even seemed to press half a head of height over the Confucian's. She sneered: "Kindly? You great cultivators of the extraordinary — for millennia you have sat perched on high, drawn your chalk circle around a patch of ground, and taken this place for nothing but an acre of cropland. This year you reap a swath, next year you haul off another bundle, year in and year out, a thousand years unchanged. And only now do you bethink yourselves of 'doing good by me, this cursed creature'?! Ha — I've heard my young master quote a line that the lot of you hold up as a golden rule: 'Whoever is not of our kind must harbor a different heart.' Is that not it? So there's no blaming Teacher Qi, for after all..."
Teacher Qi walked on, and with a light step, half a smile at the corner of his mouth: "Oh?"
After that one step.
The maid Zhigui's face shifted slightly.
The two of them, no one knew exactly when, now stood in a place of utter darkness, so black that a hand held before the face could not be seen. Far above their heads alone, countless rays of light shot down, each pregnant with a sacred breath.
It was as though they stood at the bottom of a bottomless well, those golden beams of sunlight drifting slowly down from its mouth.
The middle-aged Confucian wore a single robe of blue, and across the garment a shimmer of light flowed and coursed without end, never resting.
The vast righteous breath of the great man — open, upright, splendid.
At first the girl's face twisted into a frightful grimace, but soon it settled back into her usual numb indifference. She murmured: "Sixty years of Buddhist chanting rang in my ears like thunder, yet ceaseless, peal upon peal. Sixty years of Daoist talismans gnawed at me like worms burrowing into my very bones. Sixty years of the righteous breath of righteous learning, blotting out the very sky — nowhere to hide. Sixty years of the martial sword-breath, like the ground-ox turning over — no corner left unsplashed. Every cycle of sixty years is one more turn of the wheel. Three full millennia now, and never a day of peace... I only want to know where the true root of your so-called great Dao lies. The black characters on the white pages of the Master's books, the subtle words of the Master's hidden meaning as he teaches and resolves doubts — these I can see, and these I can hear. But they are the one thing I can never find..."
She fixed her gaze, dazed, on that man of stern rightness — at once the nameless village schoolmaster of a poor and remote backwater, and Qi Jingchun of the Cliff Academy, a student of the Confucian school, a man of letters whom even the powerful eunuch-director of the Great Sui court must have addressed as "Master."
The girl suddenly smiled and asked, "With what shall the Master teach me? How am I to be counseled into goodness? If I remember aright, your Confucianism's most-holy predecessor teacher, and one among your Daoist forbears as well, both put forward the principle of 'no distinction in teaching, no rank in learning'?"
The man shook his head. "To preach ten thousand holy precepts at you would avail nothing."
The girl, who was on the surface idly passing the time with the Confucian in easy talk, was in truth drawn taut as a strung bow. With the merest corner of her eye she kept scanning the surroundings, hunting for any thread of a breaking opening.
The Confucian turned a blind eye to this and said with a cold sneer, "I know you hold within you an unending store of fury, of resentment, of killing intent. I am not one to refuse the different and the alien. But you had best understand — to loose pity at random, to scatter compassion extravagantly without measure, that has never been the true doctrine of the three teachings."
"My young master is forever muttering that to wrangle points of reason with a bookman is the most tedious sport of all." The girl pulled at the corner of her mouth, and narrowed those bizarre golden eyes of hers, the double pupils like twin suns. "Turns out Teacher Qi truly is undergoing his last flare of returning light — and of course, more formidable than ever than before..."
He laughed the matter off. "If reason cannot be hewn through, so be it. But so long as I, Qi Jingchun, draw breath in this world and still hold the right to sit in command of this place — you ungrateful scourge, do not scheme to show your claws and bare your fangs!"
The girl pointed a finger at herself and asked, laughing, "I am ungrateful?"
The middle-aged Confucian flushed with anger: "Back then, when you were at your weakest, forced to bow your head and bind yourself of your own will by contract — who was it that saved you here in Clay Bottle Alley, in the falling snow of a great winter storm?! And who, all these years, has slowly gnawed away at the last thread of life-fortune left to him?!"
The girl smiled. "When a body is hungry, one finds something to eat and fills the belly. Is that not the most natural, heaven-sanctioned thing in the world? Besides, he had no great fated chance about him in the first place. Let him die early and be reborn early — who knows, he might even pick up some faint hope in some next life. If we simply left him drifting here in this town like a rootless duckweed — why, then that would truly be..."
The Confucian flung his sleeve wide and called out in a low voice: "Hold your tongue!"
The man of letters scolded him — her — in fury: "The profundity of the great Dao, the resplendent justice of heaven's law — by what right would you pass final judgment on them in a single sentence?! Every life has its own allotted span and its fated fortune. What standing have you to make choices on behalf of another?!"
Above the girl's head, out of nothing, there appeared a colossal hand of dazzling light, awe-inspiring in its might — as a Buddha's palm smites down the demon in one stroke, as a Daoist ancestor's hand presses low the wicked one — and it bore down upon the girl's head with swift force, forcing her to her knees in an instant, her brow thudding hard against the ground.
The sound of that kowtow rang out, heavy and resounding.
The girl, head bowed, pressed both hands against the ground and struggled to rise. Without letting her face be seen, she let out a burst of low, sinister laughter: "You may press my head low. But I will never, ever admit I was wrong!"
That vast and mighty golden hand seized the girl by the hair, lifted, pressed — another kowtow.
This time the crack of it was heavy as a vernal thunderclap.
The Confucian said in a deep voice: "Do not forget! This thread of life you enjoy is a gift from the sages — it was not wrung out by you! Or else — never mind suppressing you for three thousand years — what is thirty thousand to us?!"
The girl, her head ever pinned low, spoke in a hoarse voice: "Your stinking great Dao — I refuse to walk it!"
The Confucian raised his arm high and brought it crashing down against the empty void before him: "Insolence! Suppress, I command you!"
At the very center of the golden beams cast down from the well-mouth, there now appeared a great seal of milky white jade, a full zhang square, four-square and true. Eight ancient characters were incised upon the seal, some of them stained by an exceedingly vivid red, and countless strands of violet lightning coiled about the seal, crackling and hissing.
As soon as Qi Jingchun gave the command — in truth the legendary case of words decreeing the law — the colossal seal descended from the sky and crashed down upon the backbone of the girl, who was still kneeling.
This enormous seal, heavy with the majesty of heaven's law, seemed no solid thing. It did not squash the girl flat upon the ground; rather, it bore with it wind and thunder as it sank swiftly into the earth and vanished without a trace, like a heavy cloud spilling rain while the thunder barely rumbles.
But in the space of a single breath, the girl collapsed as though some weight had shattered every bone and sinew of her. She lay in a sodden heap upon the ground, utterly, miserably broken.
Even so, one of her hands crooked its five fingers like hooks, and with all her remaining strength she dug at the ground with her nails, as though carving characters into the earth.
Qi Jingchun's face was expressionless, his voice cold: "Three kowtows — the first, in reverence to Heaven and Earth! The second, to the teeming living! The third, to the great Dao!"
The girl's eyes were dull and blank. She gave no reply.
Qi Jingchun waved his sleeve, dissolving that suffocating, immense majesty. "I, Qi Jingchun, am no more than one rotten Confucian beneath the gate of sages, and even I could press you to three kowtows. Once you have gone out into the world and run riot as you please — are you truly not afraid of running into some power more indifferent to reason than I, who could grind you to powder with a single finger?"
Qi Jingchun sighed. "Here, to be sure, you are held down and caged, denied your freedom. But have you ever considered that there is nowhere in all the world any absolute freedom? When the sages of my Confucian school crafted their manifold rites and ceremonials, were they not, in their own way, scheming to win another manner of freedom for the teeming creatures of the world? So long as you do not overstep the bounds, do not violate the ordinances, but uphold the rites — one day, when heaven is high and earth is wide, what place and more shall you not be free to go?"
The girl raised her head and stared hard at the middle-aged Confucian.
Qi Jingchun took a step away.
And heaven and earth returned to the ordinary. He and the maid Zhigui were back in Clay Bottle Alley — the sunlight warm, the spring breeze mild.
The girl rose to her feet, swaying, a ghastly pale smile on her face, her teeth flashing faintly and grimly sharp. "The Master's instruction this day, this slave has committed to memory."
Qi Jingchun said not another word, turned, and left.
She suddenly called after him: "Even if I were ungrateful toward Chen Ping'an — why, Master, as an outstanding student beneath the sages' gate, would you stand by with folded hands? Why turn so warm a regard solely on your disciple Zhao Yao and on my young master, while for Chen Ping'an, of such ordinary origins, you have nothing better than a shrug? Is this not no different from a merchant plying his trade — if the goods are rare and hoardable, you tend them with care; if the wares are coarse, you fob them off with a wave, without a care whether they fetch a good price at all?"
Qi Jingchun smiled. "'As heaven moves in unceasing strength, so the gentleman strives ceaselessly to better himself.'"
The girl was at a loss.
As the figure of the middle-aged Confucian faded into the far end of the lane, the girl's face instantly overflowed with contempt, and she spat out a vicious *ptoo!*
She limped back toward her own courtyard, and as she passed by Chen Ping'an's house, she wrinkled her nose and knitted her brows, a little muddled in her thoughts. But because that cursed bookman's Dao-cultivation had collapsed, the town now leaked heaven's secrets on every side, like a leaky little boat taking water from all directions. She could barely manage her own affairs, and had to lay careful scheming for the future besides, so she could not be bothered to fuss over such small pickings.
When she pushed open the courtyard gate, a scrawny, unremarkable four-legged lizard shot out of some corner or other, scuttled quickly to her feet — and she sent it flying with an angry kick.
————
In Chen Ping'an's house, the young Daoist sat upright by the table, eyes watching his nose, nose watching his heart.
The black-robed girl who, not long before, had been at death's very door, now sat up on the bed on her own, cross-legged, no veiled hat upon her head — and revealed a face no one would soon forget.
It was not that the girl was a beauty to topple cities. It was rather that so fierce a spirit of youthful vigor blazed from her that a body might easily forget how striking her features were.
Her eyebrows were not drawn like willow-leaves; they were cut like narrow blades.
When she fixed the young Daoist with a gaze full of cool appraisal, the latter for a rare show was distinctly ill at ease — as though, though he had done nothing wrong, he felt a twinge of guilt.
The young Daoist coughed, and hastened to clear himself of blame: "Young lady, let me set the terms first: it was your poor priest who took her in to be saved, but carrying you into this house, lifting off your veiled hat, washing that face of yours — all that was the work of another. His name is Chen Ping'an, master of this dilapidated dwelling — a poverty-worn lad dark as a lump of charcoal, orphaned of both parents, who once served as a potter at the kiln, and even sought out your poor priest for a talisman-drawing once upon a time. That's more or less the whole of it. Young lady, if there is anything else you wish to ask, your poor priest will hold nothing back."
And thus the straw-sandaled boy was sold out, wholesale and clean.
The girl nodded, neither flying into a fury nor showing any shame, but said simply, with genuine courtesy: "I thank the Daoist for the grace of saving my life."
The young Daoist, whose heart was drumming even louder now, laughed dryly: "No trouble, no trouble. Only a lift of the hand. So long as the young lady is well, all is well."
The black-robed girl asked, "The Daoist is not a native of the Baoping Continent?"
The young Daoist shot back, "Neither is the young lady, I take it?"
She gave an *mm* of assent.
The Daoist gave an *mm* in turn.
The young Daoist, crowned with his lotus-petal headdress, smiled. "Your poor priest's family name is Lu, given name Chen. No Daoist title to speak of. Call me Lu Daozi, and it will do."
The girl nodded lightly, and flicked a glance at the Daoist's crown.
The young Daoist hesitated, then plucked up his courage: "That boy, in a few small matters, fell short of propriety. But in urgent times the rites are bent to the need, and besides, I never expected the young lady to mend so quickly. If anything was amiss, I hope the young lady will not hold it against him."
The girl smiled. "Master Lu, I am not one to be unreasonable."
The young Daoist passed it off with an easy laugh: "Good, good, well then."
The girl arched one eyebrow — and the young Daoist's smile stiffened into a fixed mask.
She swept her gaze about the room, her eyes tranquil.
She said, offhandedly: "I heard that this continent's foremost master of the sword, 'Master Ruan,' planned to set up his forge here to cast swords, and I followed him all the way to this place, hoping he would forge a blade for me."
The young Daoist said with feeling: "If it truly is him, getting him to forge a sword in person is no easy matter."
The black-robed girl clearly found it rather vexing as well. "It is hard, indeed."
Just then the boy came in — in his left hand a bundle of herbs wrapped in paper, in his right a small parcel — rapping symbolically at the door as he crossed the threshold, then setting the herbs down on the table and saying in a low voice, "Daoist, have a look and see whether I fetched the wrong ones. If so, I'll go change them at once."
The boy kept the parcel in his hand and turned to face the girl — and the black-robed girl sitting cross-legged on the plank bed returned his gaze.
The black-robed girl said calmly, "How do you do. My father's surname is Ning, my mother's is Yao. So I am called Ning Yao."
The straw-sandaled boy answered without thinking: "How do you do. My father's surname is Chen, my mother's is also Chen, so..."
A faint awkwardness flickered over the boy's face, but he soon smiled, candid and free: "My name is Chen Ping'an!"