The pounding of my heart is a roar in my ears. I should flee immediately. This is probably a trap. If I go down, he might have soldiers in ambush or some mechanism under the floor of the hall to capture me. Yet, something in his voice compels me to obey.
I drop through the hole in the roof, the silk cord attached to the grappling hook looped about my waist a few times to slow my descent. I land gently before the dais, silent as a snowflake.
“How did you know?” I ask. The bricks at my feet have not flipped open to reveal a yawning pit and no soldiers have rushed from behind the screens. But my hands grip the cord tightly and my knees are ready to snap. I can still complete my mission if he truly is defenseless.
“Children have sharper ears than their parents,” he says. “And I have long made shadow puppets for my own amusement while reading late at night. I know how much the lights in this hall usually flicker without the draft from a new opening in the ceiling.”
I nod. It’s a good lesson for the next time. My right hand moves to grasp the handle of the dagger in the sheath at the small of my back.
“Jiedushi Lu of Chenxu is ambitious,” he says. “He has coveted my territory for a long time, thinking of pressing the young men in its rich fields into his army. If you strike me down, there will be no one to stand between him and the throne in Chang’an. Millions will die as his rebellion sweeps across the empire. Hundreds of thousands of children will become orphans. Ghostly multitudes will wander the land, their souls unable to rest as beasts pick through their corpses.”
The numbers he speaks of are vast, like the countless grains of sand suspended in the turbid waters of the Yellow River. I can’t make any sense of them. “He saved my teacher’s life once,” I say.
“And so you will do as she asks, blind to all other concerns?”
“The world is rotten through,” I say. “I have my duty.”
“I cannot say that my hands are free of blood. Perhaps this is what comes of making compromises.” He sighs. “Will you at least allow me two days to put my affairs in order? My wife departed this world when my son was born, and I have to arrange for his care.”
I stare at him. I can’t treat the boy’s laughter as an illusion.
I picture the governor surrounding his house with thousands of soldiers; I picture him hiding in the cellar, trembling like a leaf in autumn; I picture him on the road away from this city, whipping his horse again and again, grimacing like a desperate marionette.
As if reading my mind, he says, “I will be here, alone, in two nights. I give you my word.”
“What is the word of a man about to die worth?” I counter.
“As much as the word of an assassin,” he says.
I nod and leap up. Scrambling up the dangling rope as swiftly as I ascend one of the vines on the cliff at home, I disappear through the hole in the roof.
I’m not worried about the jiedushi’s escaping. I’ve been trained well, and I will catch him no matter where he runs. I’d rather give him the chance to spend some time saying good-bye to his little boy; it seems right.
I wander the markets of the city, soaking up the smell of fried dough and caramelized sugar. My stomach growls at the memory of foods I have not had in six years. Eating peaches and drinking dew may have purified my spirit, but the flesh still yearns for earthly sweetness.
I speak to the vendors in the language of the court, and at least some of them have a passing mastery of it.
“That is very skillfully made,” I say, looking at a sugar-dough general on a stick. The figurine is wearing a bright red war cape glazed with jujube juice. My mouth waters.
“Would you like to have it?” the vendor asks. “It’s very fresh, young mistress. I made it only this morning. The filling is lotus paste.”
“I don’t have any money,” I say regretfully. Teacher gave me only enough money for lodging, and a dried peach for food.
The vendor considers me and seems to make up his mind. “By your accent I take it you’re not a local?”
I nod.
“Away from home to find a pool of tranquility in this chaotic world?”
“Something like that,” I say.
He nods, as if this explains everything. He hands the stick of the sugar-dough general to me. “From one wanderer to another, then. This is a good place to settle.”
I accept the gift and thank him. “Where are you from?”
“Chenxu. I abandoned my fields and ran away when the Jiedushi Lu’s men came to my village to draft boys and men for the army. I had already lost my father, and I wasn’t interested in dying to add color to his war cape. That figurine is modeled after Jiedushi Lu. It gives me pleasure to watch patrons bite his head off.”
I laugh and oblige him. The sugar dough melts on the tongue, and the succulent lotus paste that oozes out is delightful.
I walk about the alleyways and streets of the city, savoring every bite of the sugar-dough figurine as I listen to snatches of conversation wafting from the doors of teahouses and passing carriages.
“… why should we send her across the city to learn dance? …”
“The magistrate isn’t going to look kindly on such deception …”
“… the best fish I’ve ever had! It was still flapping …”
“… how can you tell? What did he say? Tell me, sister, tell …”
The rhythm of life flows around me, buoying me up like the sea of clouds on the mountain when I swing from vine to vine. I think about the words of the man I’m supposed to kill:
Millions will die as his rebellion sweeps across the empire. Hundreds of thousands of children will become orphans. Ghostly multitudes will wander the land.
I think about his son, and the shadows flitting across the walls of the vast, empty hall. Something in my heart throbs to the music of this world, at once mundane and holy. The grains of sand swirling in the water resolve into individual faces, laughing, crying, yearning, dreaming.
On the third night the crescent moon is a bit wider, the wind a bit chillier, and the hooting of the owls in the distance a shade more ominous.
I scale the wall of the governor’s compound as before. The patrolling patterns of the soldiers have not changed. This time, I crouch even lower and move even more silently across the branch-thin top of the wall and the uneven surface of roofing tiles. I’m back at the familiar spot; I pry up a roof tile that I had put back two nights earlier and press my eye against the slit to block the draft, anticipating at any moment masked guards leaping out of the darkness, to spring their trap.
Not to worry—I’m ready.
But there are no shouts of alarm and no clanging of the gong. I gaze down into the well-lit hall. He is sitting in the same spot, a stack of papers on the desk by him.
I listen hard for the footsteps of a child. Nothing. The boy has been sent away.
I examine the floor of the hall beneath where the man sits. It’s strewn with straw. The sight confuses me for a moment before I realize that it’s an act of kindness. He wants to keep his blood from stain- ing the bricks so that whoever has to clean up the mess will have an easier time.
The man sits in the lotus position, eyes closed, a beatific smile on his face like a statue of the Buddha.
Gently, I place the tile back in place and disappear into the night like a breeze.
“Why have you not completed your task?” Teacher asks. My sisters stand behind her, two arhats guarding