Chen Ping'an caught sight of the girl in blue again, trailing silently behind a middle-aged man, head bowed, gnawing at a scallion-and-egg pancake. The man wore the look of a soul with every fight gone out of it. Spotting Chen Ping'an, he stopped and asked: "Aren't you that fellow I chased off last time?"
An arm-load of weight thumped into his back; the girl who had collided with this 'wall' looked up blank, then caught sight of Chen Ping'an and, just about to smile, whirled away to wipe at her mouth in a fluster. Chen Ping'an swallowed his laugh, nodded to the man: "Good day, Master Ruan." Most likely she was his daughter, though the two did not look a bit alike — a mercy.
Master Ruan was that iron-smith who, soon after arriving in town, had moved his forge to the bank of the southern stream. He pressed: "How comes it Liu Xianyang hasn't been to the bellows these two days?"
Chen Ping'an was about to explain when the man cut him off coldly: "You tell that boy: if I don't lay eyes on His Lordship today, he needn't come to my shop tomorrow, either."
"Master Ruan, something came up at his—"
"That's his business. What the devil is it to me?!" Chen Ping'an, never quick with words, stood frozen, face burning, at a loss, afraid of doing more harm than good. Master Ruan's blunt, unbending temper he had learned at first hand. The girl tried to speak for him, but her father, knowing her as he did, chided first: "Eat your pancake!" Crestfallen, the girl quickened her step and stamped hard, heel to instep, on his foot; then, feet a blur, she was off like a puff of wind and gone. The man sighed and walked on, leaving Chen Ping'an, who sighed too, bought a six-bun basket at the breakfast stall, and hurried toward Mud Vase Lane.
At his own house he found Liu Xianyang crouched on the wall, leaning across toward Song Jixin's courtyard, listening with breathless concentration. There were times, Chen Ping'an had to admit, when Liu Xianyang richly deserved a beating.
"Heads up," he warned. "Just saw Master Ruan. He wants you at the forge today, and says if he doesn't see you, you're sacked."
"What's the hurry? An apprentice with my nimble hands and willing back — you'd need a lantern to find his like. He's only posturing; tomorrow's fine."
"I'm certain he wasn't joking."
"I'll go in a bit — don't spoil my proper business."
Chen Ping'an carried the breakfast into the house for the black-clad girl, handed three of the six buns straight up to Liu Xianyang, and kept no more than a single bite for himself. There were times, too, when he thought Liu Xianyang, perched up there like a vulture on the wall, might just as well have been a lazy cat sunning itself — though today he was all ears, hanging on the doings next door. Liu Xianyang wolfed his buns down in three or four mouthfuls, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and said in a low voice: "A visitor's come to Song Jixin's — a big one, by the look of him. If I've the right of it, he's the present kiln-bureau superintendent. That time he came to our dragon kiln in his official robes, old Yao said the sight of you unseasoned striplings spoilt the scene and wouldn't let you show your faces to learn a thing. Not me — he had me demonstrate a 'jump-cut' before His Lordship."
"Everyone knows the new superintendent favors Song Jixin. What's the good of lurking here sniffing at shadows?"
"A pale-faced pretty boy like Song Jixin could never rival me — but Heaven help me if Zhigui should take a fancy to one of these grand officials! Then my odds drop to nothing, and your future sister-in-law runs off — what am I to do? And you?" Chen Ping'an walked straight back inside, leaving Liu Xianyang crouched on the wall to bemoan his own fate.
The black-clad girl sat by the table, back straight as a rod, one hand on her blade-hilt, braced as before a foe. Sweat stood on her brow — the first time Chen Ping'an had seen such a look on her: body taut with guard, yet eyes bright, eager, itching for action. He fell back to the threshold.
"Do you know who that visitor is?"
"Liu Xianyang says he's the town's current kiln-bureau superintendent. Quite an agreeable man — yielded the way for me at the lane's mouth just now."
She laughed coldly: "It's that sort that's frightening."
Chen Ping'an was baffled.
"A man walks along the road. When he sees ants, does he step on them?"
Chen Ping'an considered: "Gu Can surely would — he's always pouring water over ant-nests, or blocking their exits with stones. And Liu Xianyang, in a foul temper, likely would too."
She was struck speechless in return. Chen Ping'an grinned, showing his teeth: "Miss Ning, I believe I take your meaning, actually."
"Really?"
"You meant two things. First, that the common folk of our town are, to you out-of-towners, ants crawling underfoot. Second, that among outsiders there are gradations. Fu Nanhua and Cai Jinjian are children like Gu Can; only such as they find it amusing to hold an ant's life and death in hand. But that officer who came to Mud Vase Lane is different — everything he says and does befits his station, and so he comes off especially courteous. Isn't that it?"
"How did you puzzle it out?"
"After clawing my way back with my life, my wits seem to have come quicker."
She asked solemnly: "When you were near death, what did you see?"
"Nothing. Truth is, in that lane I never gave much thought to anything. That question — you'd do better to put it to Fu Nanhua and Cai Jinjian; they might well have seen something."
"Hah! Big words for a small mouth!" She fell to staring at him for no reason at all.
"What is it?"
She knit her brows, vexed with herself, and muttered in a homespun dialect: "My family's sword-craft — the sword-ballad verses, the inner art, the whole way of tempering body and soul — is all a lone and private path, secrets never handed on. And I've not even mastered it myself; how would I dare teach another? Nor have I learned the coarse common stuff of the world, else I could point him at some level path, even if only to strengthen his body and stretch his years. Where am I to find him a beginner's primer of the lowest threshold?"
Her eyes brightened: "Robbery? No, no — I'd only borrow a manual, with a promise to return it in kind." Her face fell; she gnashed her teeth: "Damn that eunuch! Just you wait — I'll turn your whole palace upside down!" Then, mournful: "Must I truly go to that sword-forger Ruan? Cutting people down I can just manage, with four or five-tenths of my mother's true line. But asking a favor — that I'm no earthly good at."
The youth in straw sandals sat on the threshold, watching the girl called Ning Yao talk a blue streak to herself, her face shifting like clouds across the sky.
———
The white-robed, jade-belted man stood in Song Jixin's room, casting his eye about with a small frown: "This is the shabby corner that Song fellow has settled you in?"
Song Jixin pressed his lips. Zhigui had already had the sense to take herself to her side-room.
By the town's most-spread tale, the former superintendent, Lord Song, had served ill, failing to produce the tribute porcelain that would satisfy the court. Depending on a half measure of weary merit, he had left behind a single gallery bridge as he returned to the capital — leaving along with it the bastard Song Jixin, for whom he had bought but a body-servant, and entrusted the boy, 'orphaned' as he was, to his friend, the new superintendent, said also to bear the surname Song. But how matters truly stood, even Song Jixin did not wholly know — bosom colleague of the offices of state? Old classmate? Court rival of another faction? Before leaving, that Song had let drop that the new superintendent would soon spirit master and servant to the capital, and that Song Jixin was to treat him with the utmost reverence.
Hating the messenger for the message's sake, Song Jixin could summon no liking for this overbearing capital man. The confident air he put on toward Zhigui, his calm readiness to leave his home — these were but the pride of youth.
The man smiled: "That sour pedant of a Song was ever a fussing, timorous soul, no man of the rough and ready, more like a woman for all the spirit of him — else he'd never have been sent down here to watch over the likes of you." Song Jixin's brows darkened as a thundercloud.
The man cast a careless glance at the great chest of the boy's goods, curled his lip in disdain, and said slowly: "Before I came, I met Fu Nanhua of Old Dragon City — a luckless wretch, within a hair's breadth of shattering his whole dao-mind here. The bargain you struck with him, let it go on as before; win or lose, the profit is yours alone; I'll not muddy my hands in so petty a squabble. But before you leave, you must come with me to the gallery bridge and knock your head a few times. After that you're done. Then you come home with me, do what you're meant to do, sit the seat you're meant to sit. Simple. Do you take my meaning?"
"Oh, I take it well enough — the lord superintendent's words are not in the least obscure."
"But by what authority?" he smiled mockingly.
The man smiled too, turned, and for the first time gave the boy a straight look: "That womanish Song swears you're a marvel of endowment — a bold review, bold enough to bruise the tongue that lent it. Come, guess: by what authority?"
Song Jixin's anger kindled hotter, but he held his peace. If one looked close, there was, between the two, a faint likeness of face and bearing both.
The man savored the words: "By the authority of a peerless, heaven-ranked wretch that I am, to be your very own uncle."
Song Jixin's heart lurched; his face went a shade pale. The white-robed man turned a blind eye, laid both hands on his jade belt, and gazed out at the sky, smiling: "And by the authority of being the foremost martial man of the whole Da Li dynasty."
In truth the same words said another way would have shaken the heart a deal harder, but the man would sooner lead a rooster than be the tail of a phoenix, and held that to stand a step or two behind any man was nothing worth boasting. He thought of that Confucian sage who kept his seat here, curled his lip in contempt, and snorted. Were it not that this world closed him in, one hand alone and he could smash that Qi Jingchun and all his ilk of the three-teaching gods to a pulp.
———
In the thatched schoolhouse, Master Qi was listening to the childish recitation, sitting rigid and upright — in the truest sense of the words, a posture even such seeds of learning as Song Jixin and Zhao You could never grasp the essence of. For the Confucian teaching holds a classic of 'founding the school and naming its doctrine,' called the Great Rites, whose Self-Cultivation chapter sets down that the gentleman shall sit as a corpse — for the cadaver is the image of the spirit, and a posture still as death speaks well for one's gravity and awe.
At that very moment, as though bearing it word for word, Qi Jingchun seemed to hear the white-robed man's silent musing ring within his mind. Easily, mildly, he smiled: "A martial man taking the realm in hand — truly a marvel of marvels. Yet a white dragon in fish's clothing — that is no good omen."