‘But they are fed and sheltered and cared for,’ Iloh argued. ‘What else do they really need? They cannot all be scholars or philosophers.’
‘Look,’ Tang said, as they passed a cow pasture just in time to see a cowherd armed with a long whip enter the enclosure. The cows, up until then peacefully chewing their cud, got up and began edging away from the whip and its wielder, rolling their eyes. ‘The people are not happy with having a shepherd…’
‘That only means,’ Iloh said trenchantly, ‘that the shepherd is weak and flawed, not that the theory is unsound.’
They travelled on foot, stopping when hunger overtook them to knock on doors of village homes and scattered farmhouses and beg their supper. Sometimes, with a little bit of coin offered in lieu of food, they would go into a cheap roadside teahouse and pay for a large bowl of rice and vegetables or a meat broth which they shared between them. They came to no lasting political agreement but they did not seriously quarrel either – they squabbled about ideas until it got heated but Tang usually defused things by laughing even-handedly at both Sihuai’s frosty injured sulks and Iloh’s eruptions of volcanic temper if things came to such a pass.
It was Tang, too, who helped a girl at a country teahouse where they had broken their travels. They had had a particularly good day, and were flush with coppers they had to get rid of fast under the rules of their journey. Tang laid their bowls down on the table before his friends, and then turned to help the girl with the pitcher. She was smiling, but her gaze was steady and distant, focused somewhere far beyond the three friends.
‘She is blind,’ Tang said conversationally, ‘but she can read faces, you know.’
It was typical that he had been the one to charm the girl, to flirt with her, to gain all kinds of information about her in less than a few minutes’ acquaintance.
‘I heard about that,’ Sihuai said. ‘One of my great-uncles studied this art, many years ago. I still recall the stories they tell about how accurate and precise his predictions were, all on the basis of running his hands over the bones of people’s faces. Can you truly do this?’
‘Yes,’ the girl said with a quiet serenity.
‘Do mine,’ Sihuai said.
‘Oh, young sir!’ she demurred, sweeping her long lashes down on her cheeks. ‘Your voice is so strong and assured. I am certain your future is already known to you…’
‘Here,’ Tang said, folding their last copper into the girl’s hand. ‘It isn’t much but it’s all we have and that means we have paid you a treasure. Can you do all of us?’
For answer she reached out a hand, and Tang guided it to Sihuai’s face. She ran long fingers across his features, and then pulled back. ‘You have the face of a scholar, or a sage,’ she said. ‘You will write many scholarly books, and live far, far away from your home. But it will…it will be exile, of a sort. You will want to come back, but you won’t be able to, because you will be proscribed in the land of your childhood. You will have fame, but no fortune, and little happiness…and you will have many regrets in your life. Sorry. This is not very nice to tell. But that is in your face.’
‘What about me?’ Tang said, thrusting his face forward into her hand and closing his eyes.
‘You are a man who knows how to make friends and keep the peace, although you have no idea of how you do this,’ the girl said, and smiled with what was real warmth and almost affection despite her short acquaintance with her subject. ‘But the friends you make are often only on the surface, and the peace is dearly paid for. You will love a woman who will marry another, and that other man will be your friend, and it won’t be the first woman he gets that you will covet. You will hide your envy well, though. Your abilities will make you valuable to men in power – but they will balance their need of you with their fear of you, and you will need to learn to do the same. Your life will be hard but you will always know how to find the treasure within it…although you might think in the end that you have paid too high a price for it.’
‘You really tell it like it is,’ Tang said. ‘What about Iloh?’
‘Wait, I don’t think…’ Iloh began, but Tang had already grabbed the girl’s hand and laid it on his friend’s face. Her fingertips were feather-light on his cheekbones, on his lips. And then she sat back and gave him a long, thoughtful look.
‘You will become a great man,’ she said, ‘a prince, or a councillor…and if not that, then you will at least lead a band of outlaws from a mountaintop. You have ambition and patience. You know how to hold people in the palm of your hand.’ She hesitated, snatched her hand back, stepped backwards as if she had second thoughts about the rest of her reading. But she had accepted the copper, and she owed it. ‘But you will be stone-hearted,’ she whispered. ‘You would command a hundred thousand deaths, and it would mean nothing to you if that was the price of achieving a cherished goal. You…’ she hesitated again, but took a deep breath and continued, although a faint blush had come onto her cheeks, ‘…you will have many women, but you will truly love only once – and that will be a songbird, a woman whose spirit is free, and one you can never truly have…’
She bit her lip, as though she was regretting her candour now that she had said all that, and then turned around and hurried back the way she had come with the sureness that only a blind person walking a familiar path could understand.
‘Cheerful, isn’t she,’ Iloh said after a moment, staring after her.
The other two ‘beggars’ were still staring at Iloh’s face.
Iloh glared at them. ‘It wasn’t my idea,’ he growled. ‘It’s all a bunch of superstitious nonsense, anyway. Let’s eat; I for one am starving.’
They went on, later, and spent the rest of the summer climbing hills and crossing valleys, sleeping by streams or in sheds offered by friendly farmers, sharing space with ploughs and shovels and sometimes, memorably, dogs, goats, or wandering pigs. But then summer was over, and they returned to school – and then the years started piling on, faster and faster, and things ran away from them all. Shiqai, the warlord whose rise and fall had been the topic of their discussions that summer, had stolen the vision of the venerated man who had become known throughout the land as Baba Sung – ‘Father Sung’ – the father of a new nation. Shiqai’s death, something that seemed to come at the hands of the Gods themselves extracting payment for his many betrayals, had left a nation leaderless and fragmented, with a thousand petty tyrants leaping up to take his place, plunging the country into nearly a decade of misery and suffering at the hands of mercenary armies who took what they pleased from the people – money, livestock, men for labour and women for pleasure – and were answerable to nobody at all. But now, at last, things were moving again, and Baba Sung had gathered a new vision together – and for the first time since the Sun Emperor had been forced to step down from his throne, Syai found itself emerging from chaos into a semblance of calm and order.
Iloh followed all this with an eager curiosity. Back at the school, in the year following the beggars’ holiday with his friends, he read more and more books in his headmaster’s study – frequently proscribed material that access was granted to only on the basis of the unspoken understanding that its existence was not to be spoken of outside that room, often with Tang or Yanzi at his elbow to discuss the issues raised by what had been read. The whole churning mess of human endeavour as history unfolded – especially the turbulent times that he himself lived in – fascinated him. He had begun to eat, sleep and dream politics; he talked of little else.
‘Baba Sung has all the right ideas,’ he told Yanzi once, as they were both poring over the same broadsheet detailing some recent achievement or atrocity. ‘But he has had no power to make them happen. No real power.’
‘You mean enforce