Chapter 80

The red-hot charcoal glowed in the stove-mouth. Chen Dasheng sat in the bath-cauldron, baring his teeth as he felt at a bruise on his waist.

It was always so. Whatever he did, it was either offend Granny and get a rap on the head, or offend his wife and get a pinch. Bitters a man can't put into words. Ai. Bear it, then.

His father had said it well. A person comes into this world to eat bitterness. The one who eats no bitterness is no person, but an immortal.

Out in the yard, a little maid's voice drifted in.

"Madam, the fourth master's clothes have come from the sewing-room. Dame Yin says the last few sable pelts in the house this year all went to line the fourth master's coat. Such a pity, she says. Anyone else who came by sable as fine as that would use it for a collar, or if not a collar then a neck-warmer, and a good thing too."

His wife's unhurried voice came in from under the window.

"Set it there. That woman's all talk the livelong day. Your master's a man who wears plain cloth. Put a sable collar on him? It'd look neither one thing nor the other. Go tell the old lady I'll not come over today. Have the kitchen warm a few pots of wine and cook a few dishes to go with it, and set them all in the west wing. When your fourth master's out of the bath, go and ask the first master and the second and the third over to drink."

The little maid answered, and asked: "And, shall I ask the son-in-law master too?"

His wife said: "Our own family's business, what call to ask him? You, you're right, though! Go quietly and tell them. Don't let anyone see."

The little maid answered crisply and went. Fourth-Moon, was it? His wife had said the girl was clever. Mm, so she was, quick and careful, and bold enough to think ahead for her mistress. A good girl.

When all was quiet outside, Chen Dasheng asked through the door: "Wife? Still angry?"

No answer for a while, then: "Over a little thing like this? Would I?"

Chen Dasheng opened his mouth, helpless, bared his teeth as he felt the bruise, and nodded in earnest agreement: "True enough. My wife was always big-hearted."

That satisfied her, and she was willing to talk to him again. She laughed a little and asked: "The New Year's nearly here. Isn't our father coming?"

Chen Dasheng let a slow breath out and settled lower into the water. She'd made it too hot, but he dared not complain.

He wrung out a cloth, laid it over his face, and said in a muffled voice: "Father says he takes your kindness to heart, but a man weighed down with sin like his won't enjoy the world's blessings."

The true words had been: my whole family went down to hell, so on the strength of what should I enjoy the world above?

Qi Qian'er was quiet, and after a while said: "So that's it. And the Emperor's given you leave?"

Chen Dasheng nodded under the cloth, then turned his head and called out: "Mm! The Emperor said to go back after the Lantern Festival. Says it's been a hard few months..." Something came to him, and he stopped and listened. Sure there was no one about, he said: "Wife, when the New Year's past, there'll likely be an edict come to the house. Father says I'm to be promoted. He says to have a new patent of rank made up for you..."

Silence outside. A long while, then his wife let out a strange, sighing sort of sound: "Upper fifth grade already? They all say the fifth grade's a wall a man breaks his head on, and you've gone over it who knows how. It's been no time at all."

Chen Dasheng set his teeth: "Upper fifth grade. Two grades."

Laughter came again from beyond the door. His wife wasn't wild with joy, but asked in a light, easy tone: "You're a strange one. Even your rising in office goes unlike anyone else's. I'd thought that even with Father looking out for you, you'd have to grind out three years' seniority at the least. Tell me, this time, how did you come to be an upper-fifth-grade lord?"

Chen Dasheng breathed softly out, reached over to the little wine-pot on the rim of the cauldron, and drank two mouthfuls from the spout: "I don't want to tell it!"

Outside the bath-house she laughed again, light and easy: "I've set your clothes by the brazier. In a bit I'll have Jixiang come wait on you. Have him do whatever you need."

Chen Dasheng asked quickly: "Are you angry?"

But Qi Qian'er said from the yard: "No. Our lord's risen in office. Tonight I'll cook a few of your favorite dishes myself."

Chen Dasheng snatched the cloth off, a smile at the corner of his mouth: "You know my favorite?"

Qi Qian'er said, a touch impatient: "Meat, of course! When did you ever eat anything fine..."

That said, she went, her step light as a feather.

Chen Dasheng laughed without a sound, shut his eyes content, soaked at his ease, and now and then reached to the rim to pick up a slice of pig's ear laid ready there and eat it.

That was how he was. Poor-born and knowing little, to him meat alone was the good thing.

But eating away, he fell to sighing. To his mind, there was something a little sickening in this last promotion.

The thing went back to the day the mad nun came. How many nights had it been, the Emperor sleeping in his room, the mad nun crouched on the roof, the seven of them standing bare in the cold wind, and hearing the Midnight Songs of the Four Seasons dozens of nights running.

Among themselves they called that tune the nun's spring-heat song.

Riding home slow today, he'd heard someone behind him humming the cursed lines. In autumn I love the geese, that go in pairs... I lift my head and look at the paulownia, its blossom a pitiful thing... It gave him a start, and he whipped round, and it was Little Fifth, Hu Yougui.

Hu Yougui blinked, and then gave a start of his own.

No one knew why Qing Buyi had gone mad. Still less did anyone know why she was set on it that the Emperor had killed Tan the Second.

When it was plainly he who'd killed him!

The whole realm might doubt the Emperor. Only they seven might not. They all knew the Emperor was wronged, and had no way to explain it for him. There was the sickening thing.

So the one sleeping inside was choked with anger, and the one on the roof was choked with anger, and the seven of them standing bare had their grievance too.

Dozens of days went by. Then one morning, coming off watch and passing a teahouse, they heard a storyteller inside. He was telling how the Emperor, years back, met Tan the Second and drank and opened his heart to him, and took him for a bosom friend, and how they burned incense and swore brotherhood, and vowed to win the realm together and share the glory of it...

The Emperor was a capable man, sure enough. He'd heard this tale dozens of times, and every time his face lit with pleasure, and he'd hand out gifts and say how fine it was. Chen Dasheng was sick to death of it.

The tale that day was the same old one, but the mood in the room was not. The storyteller had barely started when a scholar sitting in the teahouse gave a cold laugh and jeered out loud. He said that when a man had no rank and no power, any friendship counted for friendship, but the fear was that once he came into fortune he'd turn his face and know you no more.

Turning his face was the least of it. The sickening part was that a man might have his very life schemed away.

This fellow had a loose mouth. When he'd said it, someone beside him with a looser one asked why. And the scholar quoted book and text, and reeled off case after case of founding emperors who'd killed the ministers that served them. He never said it straight out, but the meaning ran plain under the words: that the Emperor, having won the realm, felt Tan the Second's merit was too great, past all rewarding, and so could only do away with him.

The listeners drew a cold breath together. Chen Dasheng looked in through the bright window, and saw that every face believed it. The teahouse keeper was half frightened to death, and came out himself to shoo the guests away.

Chen Dasheng thought then: since the mad nun came, the Emperor had held his hand, and now the realm reckoned the Emperor in the wrong? And rot like this was going about? It was pure nonsense. And to his mind, the Emperor was carrying the blame for him. That he could not bear.

So Chen Dasheng stepped in through the teahouse door, put out a hand and flipped the loose-mouth's table, hauled up the old-dynasty scholar talking his rot, and got up on the storyteller's table.

Never minding how the loose-mouth struggled, and seeing the guests make to run, Chen Dasheng pointed at the teahouse door and said, today, one and all, whoever dares run, I break his legs!

That was how his granny used to threaten him, and the words worked every time.

The guests were frightened stiff. And seeing a row of guard-officers blocking the door cold-faced, they each bent their heads and trembled and dared not stir.

Chen Dasheng looked round, saw they'd all gone quiet, and nodded, satisfied. He set his long saber down on the storyteller's table and said his say.

"My name's Chen Dasheng. My old home's in the lower two-rivers country the fish-canal ruined, where my eight generations of ancestors lie drowned to this day. I was born a contract-slave... And now I keep the night-watch at the Great Liang palace's south gate, and hold an empty title, Gate Marquis."

"The Emperor gave me a name too, Feilian. Chen Feilian! Mark this face of mine, and this name. Like as not you'll hear it often after this. Anyone who dares say a word against our Emperor, I'll knock the teeth clean out of his mouth, believe me or not?"

Chen Dasheng didn't look at the man. One hand hauled up the scholar, and the other drove a fist into his loose mouth. The man spat five or six teeth on the spot, his mouth all blood.

Chen Dasheng threw him to the floor and went on: "Just so! Mark it! Today I heard this wretch say those words and it didn't sit with me. Now, does no one else know the truth of this? Is there a soul under heaven who knows it better than we few brothers? You listen close! You don't know who I am, hear me out, then go outside and stop any Great Liang official you like, from the lowest yamen runner up to the first-grade lords, and ask. They'll all know me.

"Even were Marshal Tan to come, he'd not dare say he knew the Second General better than we brothers do! And who are we? We're the Long Sabers who once sold our lives for Tan the Second, the men who scraped a few bits of silver in the Tan army's Long Saber Battalion to feed our families and risk our necks.

"Today I'll tell you a tale too. I'll tell you how the Second General died. For there's no one left in this world who knows it better than we few. The day he died we were all there, every one of us, right here still... You've heard this hearsay and that. Can it match what we saw with our own eyes? How does the old saying go? Oh. Seeing is believing, hearing is not. Isn't that it?"

Chen Dasheng was a clumsy talker. He said little, and said it flat. At first the guests were frightened. In the end more and more came to listen, until the hitching-rail outside the teahouse was thick with people.

And Chen Dasheng spared the Tan house no face. How they'd mustered, how they'd waited on reinforcements that never came, how the Second General went mad at the last, how alone he'd whirled his saber and gone straight in against the Black Cavalry and never come out again...

At the end he summed it up: "...we old sabers, from the day we shouldered this thing, the men we faced were the Black Cavalry. Two armies at war, life and death rest with Heaven, and each man serves his own master. Meet on the field, and it's fight to the death. I live, he dies. He lives, I die. No one may hold it against another. Like as not we report to King Yama one after the other, and line up in the same queue.

"We can't remember how many of the Black Cavalry we killed. I only remember there were once two thousand of us Long Saber brothers, and a thousand nine hundred and ninety-three died, and now there are but seven of us left in the world. Oh, and there's Meng Quanzi over in Qingfeng, and he's half a one. He's a two-rivers man too. Half his village were kin, and he was the only one who lived.

"We're all somebody's born-and-raised child. Who wants to die? But you meet, and it's war, and men have to die. That night the last of the Black Cavalry all died, and the Second General died too. The Black Cavalry and the Long Saber Battalion were a blood-feud. No one may grudge another his death. We made our peace with fate long ago. What's this of not sharing the glory together? What's this of merit past all reward? Are you fools?"

Chen Dasheng glared round at them all. He'd said his say. He stood, and looked at the scholar beside him, mouth all blood, so frightened by now he'd wet his trousers, and said: "Old dynasty, are you? By that dress of yours? Your house fallen on hard times? So you're sore and grudging, angry and bitter, and you go making up stories about our Emperor?"

He pointed at his own eyes: "I'm a small-minded man. I've marked that loose mouth of yours!"

The loose-mouth fainted dead away.

Chen Dasheng shouldered his saber, and jeered at the silent crowd: "Are you really fools, or only playing at it? Was there a kind of day you never went through under the old dynasty? It's been one year! What wealth is there in this realm to speak of? The treasury's empty, the granaries are empty, the land lies waste, and that fish-canal has ruined the lower two-rivers country year on year till the people there are gone to the last soul!

"Our Emperor, and the old lords of the whole court, from the day the Great Liang was founded they've scrimped and saved, wanting to do a few good things, wanting to dredge the rivers for the common folk, wanting to mend the fish-canal and let the realm win back some strength, so you can eat your fill, so you can put clothes on your backs! Glory, tss, glory? Whoever wants this broken realm can have it. You think our Emperor was so glad to take it on!"

His cursing done, he walked out red-eyed, and the further he walked the more he felt he'd wronged the Emperor. He slept a whole day, went back into the palace, and that night the Emperor had him into the council hall. The Emperor stood before him, seeming much moved, and when the feeling had passed he clapped him on the shoulder, his big eyes reddening, and said: "I! I did not misjudge you! Good boy!"

Chen Dasheng's legs went weak, and he near sank to the floor.

The Emperor praised him, and the chancellor praised him, and the old Grand Tutor stroked his silver hair and sighed: "For the peace of all the people under heaven, to play the fool, this old man would do it and count it sweet!"

And the ministers who'd rarely had much to do with them were smiling at the seven of them now?

Chen Dasheng was muddled. He thought: my Emperor, I've wronged you, letting you bear a great blame for me, and you call me a good boy?

The more he thought, the more ashamed he grew. Red-faced, he made his bow to the Emperor and withdrew from the council hall, and went back to his faithful night-watch to work off his sin. He'd wronged his master. From now he must labor twice as hard to be worth the man's grain...

Then he heard his foster-father say in the hall, rather proud: "My son's always been so. An honest lump, and shy of praise too. Don't praise him, my lords. Nothing frightens him like praise..."

Chen Dasheng leaned weakly against a palace pillar, looked up at the just-darkening sky, and thought: what in the world has come over the times?

Mm. In the end he was promoted. Two grades!

Later Chen Dasheng came to understand it. When a new dynasty rises, old and new grind against each other, and there's no end of strife, not only at court but among the people, where rumor springs up thick, all manner of muddled talk. And the worst of it was that the Martial Emperor killed his meritorious ministers.

But you can't cut every last head off. The people of the realm are mostly a tide that drifts as it's pushed, past reasoning with, and cut as you might, you'd never cut them all.

The rumor that the Emperor killed Tan the Second was an old one. For it the Emperor had even had the best writer of the old dynasty set down the whole course of his rebellion, with special weight on his friendship with Tan the Second, and this Record of a Clear Heart had gone down through the offices with the public documents. The Emperor hoped the people would understand. But most of the people couldn't read.

The notices weathered away at the gates of every prefecture and county, and no one went to read them. And why the Tan house could harry the Emperor so and he had no answer, in his foster-father's words, was this: against a thing like rumor, even the Emperor of Heaven is helpless.

It was a tale worth telling, that in all this world there should be one Chen Dasheng who knew the truth. He had a guilty devil in him, and so he'd gone and explained it with an easy conscience. Whatever anyone else said was only "they analyze," "it's said," "one hears." But he was a victim of the old dynasty, and Tan-army born besides, the last old saber at Tan the Second's side. So his account was the one to be believed.

And that last part of his especially seemed to prick the truth straight open. Yes. Anyone with a head on him would think it. What was left of the old dynasty? Besides a tottering, poverty-stricken realm and a people barely alive, what was there?

What great wealth? There was none! This Great Liang had only an Emperor who'd rebelled to win the people a way to live, and a crowd of old ministers wearing themselves out to set things right.

The people's hearts are a good thing. Out of nowhere the Emperor's wrong was washed away, and of a sudden he had the people's hearts.

He was sure of it. Feilian was the man he trusted most, there at his very bedside.

Chen Dasheng was baffled, and the whole court was baffled, and the Emperor was baffled, and when they'd done being baffled they were all glad together. And with the coming to Yanjing of the mad nun's father, Qin Zhuo, Chen Dasheng was set free of it at last.

The Emperor gave the old sabers a great holiday. As he left, Attendant She told Chen Dasheng that when the New Year was in, after the Emperor's sacrifice, a batch of able court officers would be raised in rank, and they'd be among them. My son goes up two grades, the other boys have done well too, each up one grade, and there are rich gifts besides, but no need to speak of those.

Hearing he was to be promoted again, Chen Dasheng was more ashamed than ever. Seeing his son's face so calm, Attendant She was the more pleased, and thought: my son's steady, sure enough. Not only clever, but with a general's heart, that changes not its color though a mountain fall before it. His great rise is sure.

Pleased, he loaded his son with a great heap of things, of course, and told him to hurry home for the New Year.

That was the whole course of Chen Dasheng's promotion, and he thought it shameful, and wouldn't tell his wife.

But he did not know that disaster was right before his eyes. There are things in this world that come out beyond all expectation, and some people who will always go running off the track.

Her own lord had risen in office, and Qi Qian'er was glad, of course. Even in the last life, when her lord had been a dead hero of the Great Liang, she'd not been so glad.

A living lord who made good was the thing!

When the New Year was past, her lord would stand level with Tang Jiuyuan of the chessboard court. Another year, and if she found some way to get the fool a bit more merit, another grade. And then her own An'er would be the proudest little imp on all Quanhou Street.

Her heart full of these fine thoughts, Qi Qian'er made Chen Dasheng a great sheep's head. A cow at the manor had fallen in a ditch and died, and she'd meant to keep it for the New Year, but now she brought it out and sliced a plate of the best beef. She was cutting away, glad at heart, when her knife stopped of a sudden.

For four or five li around, an unusual stir she'd know at a hearing. Seven or eight uncommon wind-cutting sounds had come down on the old ancestral hall.

Qi Qian'er turned and looked at Guyu, and told him: "Come here, keep cutting. If anyone asks for me, say I've gone to the mill-room."

Guyu was blank a moment, and thought: the madam not only cooks with her own hands, she means to grind flour for the fourth master with her own hands too. What a virtuous mistress. He reached out, all smiles, to take the knife. But the madam went out with the knife in her hand, and he dared not ask for it.

At the Quanhou Street ancestral hall, under the night sky, seven figures stood tall, looking about them on every side.

They watched a while. Seeing a place off in the distance ablaze with lamps, a middle-aged man said: "Master, that's the Chen house. Their sons and grandsons are making a good-fortune cauldron for their old lady just now."

The old man standing in the midst, no, by his look he was thirty-odd at the most, well-kept, his hair black as lacquer, fair and handsome. His inner arts were nicely trained, so that though he was sixty-three this year, you'd never have known it.

In the martial world this man's fame stood level with Master Xuanshan of the Nation-Protecting Temple.

His surname was Qin, his name Zhuo, and he was the head of the house of Qin She.

Qin Zhuo wore a thin single robe. In the bitter cold his broad sleeves lifted and flew on the wind, so that he looked a very immortal.

"Hmph! Their house eats and drinks well, opera and good-fortune cauldrons and all, while my child was shamed a full month and more! Those Long Sabers are base creatures, that dare not meet a foe face to face, and go about their business like very beasts!"

Qin Zhuo's disciple, beside him, was seething too: "Master, who'd ever have thought Yang Zao so shameless a wretch. Today, come what may, we'll kill a few, and let out our senior sister's rage, and see some blood..."

But the man hadn't finished when a soft laugh came from the eaves next door: "Oh! Yang Zao's shameless? Go find him, then! What's this? Can't provoke the Emperor, so you bully a gate-watchman, and call that a skill?"

Everyone started, Qin Zhuo most of all. He whipped his head round, and something went stiff in his heart. In all these years, when had he last found his skin creep into gooseflesh?

On the ridge-beast of the roof next door lounged a young woman, easy and slantwise. She wore a mask and a coat of purple sable, and on her embroidered shoes, swinging to and fro, hung two great fur pom-poms.

No one could tell the woman's age. But her movement startled them, for she leaned there boneless and easy, and though she talked she was cleaning her nails, it seemed, with a kitchen knife.

Qin Zhuo was faintly startled, and thought: when had this woman come, and when had she sat down here, that he'd not known it? Roaming the martial world these several decades, not even Xuanshan in his prime had ever made him feel a threat.

This one?

His eyes lit of a sudden, and, a rare thing, he raised a hand: "This old man's eyes are dull. I wonder, is the young madam the Elm-Tree Lady of Baiquan Mountain?"

The woman gave a rippling laugh and smoothed her hair with a hand: "Oh! You know me? Have you been to my temple? Have you burned me any incense?"

Qin Zhuo bent to no one in his life. That he'd speak on level terms like this was rare indeed.

Since Tan the Second died and his daughter went mad, Qin Zhuo had had no way to loose his heart, and forever wanted to be doing something. Yes! He rued it. He rued having wasted his daughter's youth, rued raising up before Tan the Second a mountain he could not climb, saying that only a man of princely rank could barely be worthy of Qin Zhuo's daughter.

Year after year, Tan the Second had striven, and his daughter had waited. This father and daughter were both stubborn souls. To own a fault was not in them, so there was nothing for it but to go mad.

Now his daughter had been shamed by the bared bodies of the old sabers. Qin Zhuo would not bring trouble on his school, but come what may he wanted this rage out of him. He knew some reason in his heart, and knew that if Yang Zao died the realm would fall into chaos again and drag the people down with it.

Not wishing the name of Qin She dragged in, he could only come and deal with the old sabers to vent himself. And he'd not looked to meet, here at the foot of Baiquan Mountain, the recluse Elm-Tree Lady.

Qin Zhuo did not want to provoke her, and said with a cold snort: "This old man is Qin Zhuo!"

Qi Qian'er was blank a moment. She didn't know who was the head of the martial world, and what if she had? Whoever got in the way of her lord's rise was a thunder-struck bastard, one and all!

So she thought nothing of it and asked: "Your name's Zither-Table? Have you a brother called Zither-Stool?"

Qin Zhuo flew into a rage. How many years since anyone had spoken to him so.

He put out a hand, drew the sword at his waist, and went straight for the ill-mannered Elm-Tree Lady.

On the Little New Year night, in the whirling snow, the bound Qing Buyi tumbled out of the cart, bare-headed, and looked up at the sky and sang:

Well I know the three summer months are a torment, and today, alone, the more so. With a scented cloth I brush the jade mat, to climb the tower and lie down with my love. Light clothes, no heavy colors, yet the gusting wind brings no cool. When will the dog-days pass, that I may put on my rouge and powder? High summer's no season for roaming, and a hundred cares tangle close. To drift a boat on Lotus Lake, and loose my thoughts among the lotus-seeds...

Haha, fool, my dad's not home. Shall we go boating?

A few crisp sounds came out of the sky, and a woman's voice called: "Hey! Old Table, there's a nun down below pining with love, do you see her?"

"Hold your tongue! Talk no rot, and take my sword..."

"You hold yours too, and take my knife!"