Chapter 85

"To travel with you, Lord Zhuo, is one of life's true pleasures."

"If it were truly a pleasure, why has Young Master Song put off accepting till now?"

Zhuo Siheng did not seem minded to take up Song Duan's courtesies, but he was not vexed either, and only answered with a smile, "Since I came to my post I've worked hard, and seen in person to every matter great and small these two years. Your doubts of me will fade as you come to know me better. Meeting now, we spare ourselves a deal of needless pushing and testing, and can enjoy the walk the more, arm in arm."

Zhuo Siheng found that in talk with Song Duan he came off no worse, yet got no bargain out of him either. The young man was slippery as could be, but his talk had a logic of its own, like a push-hands match, and whatever he pushed back came, somehow, exactly to the answer the question needed.

So Zhuo Siheng only smiled too and said no more, and the two went on in silence through the hills of Anhua's westernmost edge. Here the spring was all lingering mist and rain, but today was clear, the damp mist lifting, and under the green canopy that filled the sky the wild tree-flowers swayed in their many shapes.

Anhua Commandery lay in the northwest of Jinzhou, parted from the neighboring Jiangzhou by one coiling nine-bend ridge, and it was just this ridge that Zhuo Siheng and Song Duan now crossed, the very barrier that shut off Jinzhou's land road to the west.

These two years Zhuo Siheng had opened the road south from Anhua. The mountain ways on either side between Yongming and Anhua were well built now, a day and a bit to cross, and a good caravan could make it in a single day's march. With travel easier than before, and the crag kiln famous and the rock tea prized, the Futing road between Anhua and Yongming had become for a time the busiest in the prefecture. A good many villagers carried their own produce and handwork to sell along it, and at the gentler foot of the hills, inns and shops of the mountain villages sprang up overnight.

But the western side was still closed, and Zhuo Siheng meant, in his last year, to make opening the west his chief business.

So this year, inspecting the spring plowing, he came last to the west of Anhua, and from the coiling ridge set out toward Jiangzhou. And Song Duan, who had kept refusing his invitations, suddenly had the time, and asked of his own accord to come and see the rare relics of Chu custom on this Min-Yue borderland.

"Jinzhou is the old land of Min-Yue, but to the west it borders the Chu country and the Chu waters, and the people and the ways are wholly different. I'd long wished to come and see, and my Third Uncle balked at every turn, and only by your lordship's good luck do I come to roam here at last." Song Duan was talkative enough, and all the way his mouth never rested, with a word of comment for every flower and blade, and Zhuo Siheng liked to hear it, the more so now on the local ways and relics, which he cared about keenly.

"I came here before the spring plowing last year, but the south road wasn't yet cut through then, so I had to hurry back with no time to linger, and only today walk the western hills at leisure. A pity there's no mountain road yet, so the going is hard. I've put you to the trouble of it, Young Master Song." Zhuo Siheng plucked a tree-leaf as he went and tucked it carefully away, his words, like his step, neither hurried nor slow.

"Were you born in the capital and raised in Shuozhou, my lord?"

The question fell on Zhuo Siheng from nowhere.

"Yes, I was in the north from a boy, and only came south after I was capped and sat the examinations."

"Strange. To me you look like a man of Chu, my lord, and above all like one famous man of the Chu country."

The famous men of Chu were past counting, Qu Yuan and Xiang Yu and all, each a name in the histories. Zhuo Siheng did not know what Song Duan was getting at, and only listened with a smile.

"You are very like the white-robed chancellor of our dynasty's founding, who became the Prince of Chu'an in after years, Master Yun Wuya."

Zhuo Siheng knew well enough who this Yun Wuya was. A commoner caught in the ruin of a broken age, he met Taizu by chance and was called to grace, and with a minister's gift of statecraft helped found the dynasty. Any history of the age would surely write him up in full, a founding minister with a legend about him. But the strangest thing of his life was not its first half. Once the realm was settled, he gave up his office and went home to the Chu country of Jiangzhou, and took Taizu's one and only grant of a princedom to a man not of the imperial house, but took it for himself alone, and begged Taizu not to pass it to his sons. So there was only ever one Prince of Chu'an, though his descendants were well treated by the throne ever after. Before Master Yun died, it was said, he bade his sons never to seek office, and held that to pass an uneventful life in the ease and honor of a rich home country was its own kind of fortune. Some said too that Master Yun was deep in the Changes and the arts of number, and had cast his own fortune, and read in it that a descendant would disgrace the name and wreck a hundred years' work, and so chose the other road, to shelter his line in honor. And the darker-minded believed Yun Wuya had hidden his wits and played the fool to escape the old end of the hunting-dog cooked once the hares are caught, and so won instead the quiet and the plenty of a peaceful country home.

In short the talk about him had near grown into a study of its own, and only with time died down a little. The Yun descendants still lived in ease and quiet in the Chu country now, and Yun Wuya's story had turned by degrees into a tale of legend, passed round in the marketplace.

Zhuo Siheng felt that look at it how he would he was nothing like this fellow, and did not know why Song Duan said so. "Master Yun was free and bold and open. I'm no match for him, and at my age he was already next only to the emperor and above all other men, soon to help Taizu to his great work. Such gifts and such powers I can only look up to from afar. That is no modest word."

"You're on the mountain and can't see its height, my lord. As a boy I loved most to read the odd, curious tales of Master Yun, and though most were wild, showy stuff, that a man could set off so many strange and winding fancies shows Master Yun had his own marvel in him. I thought the same before I met you, my lord. Meeting you, though the mystery's gone, I'm the more curious what manner of man you truly are. I think that's just how Master Yun struck people in his day." Song Duan smiled at Zhuo Siheng at this. "So it turns out it's I who am on the mountain now."

Zhuo Siheng rather wished to say: read a little less of your Laozi and Zhuangzi. Your Third Uncle begged me before I came to talk with you, to turn that clever head of yours to real learning, to touch real people and real things and real affairs. But seeing it now, this young Master Song was not likely to take that road. Then again, Zhuo Siheng had urged Song Yunhe not to force such things, and had given Ciheng as his example, and Song Yunhe had only sighed and asked that Lord Zhuo do what little he could, and leave the rest to Song Duan's own fate.

So Zhuo Siheng had a whole bellyful of exhortation to study brewed up, but before a word was out, Song Duan broke in.

"My lord! We're here!"

His voice was glad as a child's, and following his pointing hand Zhuo Siheng felt his own head swim a little at the sight.

Before them stood the one small town in the coiling western ridge of Anhua, Jianyang Town, its old city wall built of the ridge's own blue stone, half-hidden, half-shown among the dense banyans of the layered forest, mountain streams winding through the crowded gaps, rough and circling, with a dim, hazy, mist-wrapped beauty past telling. Now the wall was hung all over with vermilion banners, and between them, at spaces, wooden tablets carved with a dark bird. People in bright clothes were crowding a bent old figure in a mask out of the town, and in that great throng not a few were bare to the waist, a crossbar borne on the shoulder, though to what end there was no knowing.

"The Chu people are given to the shaman's arts, and this spring plowing-opening rite of theirs is wholly unlike any other." Zhuo Siheng had done his field survey before he came. He'd meant to look at the local ways and the roads, and whether a road west to Jiangzhou could be cut, so he clapped Song Duan's shoulder and signaled him to follow and see what it was.

Jinzhou lay in the southeast, and though one could farm there the year round, many warmth- and damp-loving crops still had to wait till the soil was warm enough and the rains had come to be sown.

In his two years in Jinzhou Zhuo Siheng had never let the root of things slip, and at each spring and summer plowing had gone round the commandery urging the county officers to keep the seasons. Anhua was all sisal gardens and sisal pools now, but every household that kept a set share of its own farmland in grain and sowed it on time each year had some remission of its yearly tax, so every house took to the plow, and when spring came the whole commandery was glad and busy.

Jianyang Town, for all its different ways, got the same treatment as the rest of Anhua, so its spring-plowing fervor ran high. Zhuo Siheng followed the singing, dancing crowd out to the fields, where a wooden altar stood ready, and the bare-chested farmers let down the crossbars from their shoulders one by one, while two slight masked attendants in bronze bird-beak masks helped the aged figure in the dark-bird mask and the long red plumes up onto the altar step by step.

The figure swayed, near to falling more than once, and only with the two attendants always steadying it climbed at last to the top. Then came a chanting neither Zhuo Siheng nor Song Duan could follow, and with a sprig of plane-wood a fire was lit, and seeds in a clay bowl burned, then scattered into the crowd for all to scramble after.

Zhuo Siheng and Song Duan were jostled apart by the scrambling crowd. Neither had ever seen such a custom, and both were caught off guard. Many of the onlookers too wore masks of carved wood and woven cane, strange and bright as they crossed and met, and Zhuo Siheng felt as if he walked in a dream. He was not in his official robe, and pushed this way and that, he could not even get a hand free to catch someone and ask what it all meant.

Then a hand took hold of his sleeve.

Zhuo Siheng steadied himself and looked, and found, come before him from where he could not say, one of the bronze bird-beak-masked attendants who had steadied the old figure.

"Stranger, the great shaman says she would see you after the rite."

It was this attendant holding his sleeve who had spoken, and only now, from the voice, did he make out the clear, lovely tone of a young woman, so calm and settling in the uproar. Zhuo Siheng made a slight bow and said, "I'm newly come and don't know the ways here. Pray tell me, what is being done?"

"The burnt-seed scramble, to open the fields for the spring plowing." The young woman was free and easy enough, her voice coming from behind the mask with a ring of bronze and a strange, airy note. "This is a Chu custom, not one the Min-Yue folk keep. These years much of the town's land lay waste, and thanks to the commandery's new orders every house has broken new ground and opened new fields, and only from last year did they take up this rite again, praying for kind seasons and good harvests, to win next year's tax-remission."

At that something cleared in Zhuo Siheng's head of a sudden, and he asked at once, "And how do the fields stand? Is there water enough to draw for them? What grain do the people here like to grow? Can the folk now support fields on such a scale? And what else troubles them?"

Through the eyeholes of the mask the young woman's gaze rested on him, whether in curiosity or puzzlement there was no telling, as if no one had ever pinned her down with such questions, and she was quite at a loss, until after a long while she laughed aloud. "That you should ask of the lords at the town yamen. I only wear a mask and lend a hand to make up the crowd. I know nothing of the shaman's arts and can't answer such things."

Zhuo Siheng felt too that he should mend this habit of seizing on any passerby to ply his trade, and laughed. "Coming here new, with the Ba-Chu ways all a dazzle to me, I thank you, miss, for setting me right."

By now the rite seemed near its end, and Zhuo Siheng saw Song Duan without the least unease about him, happily scrambling with the local folk for the burnt seed, and having caught some, scalded, tossing the still-smoking seeds from hand to hand.

The feeling of minding a child on a spring outing rose in him, and Zhuo Siheng shook his head with a helpless smile. But seeing the great shaman on the altar beckon to him, he asked the masked young woman to lead the way, and the two went round behind the altar to a bamboo-roofed house on stilts, and when they'd gone in, the great shaman came tottering in too, and Zhuo Siheng went with the young woman to steady her. The shaman said a few words in the local tongue he could not follow at all, and he looked to the young woman for help.

"The great shaman says you are an honored guest, and need not stoop to hold her up," the young woman rendered in clear court speech.

To his shame, Zhuo Siheng had mastered the local dialect, but this town's speech was of the Chu tongue, near a second foreign language, and he'd not yet had time to learn it, so he had to beg the help of a live interpreter.

"I'm no honored guest, only one who'd learn a little of the local ways, and I beg your pardon for the trouble I've caused."

When the young woman had rendered it and heard the shaman's reply, she looked up suddenly, and gazed at Zhuo Siheng with a strange look, and only after a long while spoke. "The great shaman says your body is only a mortal frame, yet your soul comes from the nine heavens above, and is noble past measure, and that your coming is the last good fortune before her own soul departs. She would cast a divination for you, as a parting gift."

Zhuo Siheng was taken aback. He had never set much store by such things, but to have a hidden thing of his named aloud made his heart give a jump all the same.

The great shaman unfastened from her waist a tortoise-shell dark as black jade, and looked at the young woman, and drew from the hair at her temple a few stalks of yarrow kept for ornament, still bearing their small white flowers. The young woman started too, and stepped back without meaning to, as if she had never seen the like, the puzzlement and hesitation in her eyes no less than Zhuo Siheng's.

Nine times the great shaman waved the yarrow, then set nine of its flowers into the tortoise-shell, shook it nine times toward the four quarters of heaven and earth, and at last cast them scattering to the ground.

She took off her mask and knelt with her face to the floor a long while, and when she raised it Zhuo Siheng saw a face furrowed past reading its age.

Then the great shaman, smiling weakly, said a long sentence to the young woman, and after a good while the young woman nodded, and turned to Zhuo Siheng, and gave him the words of his fortune.

Two births, two worlds. Soul, O soul, come home. The phoenix returns to the Thunder Deep, to make the ten thousand realms anew. The mandate of heaven turns and turns again. Vermilion brightness takes over from the night. One step, and all is made plain. One thought, and all is struck with dread.