“Then why would anyone ask you questions?”
“Because they trust me.”
Ju-hai didn’t know whether to be skeptical or perplexed, and his face revealed the conflict.
The shaman explained, “When the spirit takes my body, I don’t hear what you say, I don’t hear what it says. So I can’t tell you any lies, I can t make any mistakes.”
“But your pet devil can tell me any kind of nonsense, and what can I do to him?”
The Mongolian chuckled. “You see what a lot of fellows don’t. When they get worried enough, they’ll believe anything. But a lot of times, my spirit-devil gives them good advice.”
After a long silence, Ju-hai said, “You’re on your way to Ch’ang-an.” A grunt, a nod, and then Ju-hai resumed, “At the Moon Festival, I’m going to Ch’ang-an with my Old Man’s wagon train. You wait and give your leg a chance. I’ll see you get food, and you can ride one of the wagons. I’m Ju-hai. My father is the Kwan.”
“I’m Yatu and I don’t know who my father was.”
Yatu made for the cooked-food stall near the inn, and Ju-hai went to his apartment in the Kwan quarter of the village.
Chapter II
Ju-hai’s crowded life was quite too diversified to permit monotony: with an early morning start as a farmer, he put in more than half a day, sometimes working, sometimes overseeing; then, three or four hours were spent at the Kwan Village school, where he was becoming a literate countryman, a status by no means rare, yet, a step upward. After evening rice came the diversities—calligraphy, reading of classics, or several hours of pursuing his avocation, the working of jade.
One of the bedrooms of the apartment had been converted into a workshop dedicated to what had been a dominant passion until Hsi-Feng’s ripening femaleness became a distraction, a competitor, at least and thus far, on the emotional level.
Details of his patterned life-style varied according to circumstance. He might eat with the family on holidays and birthdays, and certainly would join in all festivals. There were conferences with the Old Man, in his office, where Ju-hai was briefed on the season’s prospects and how to offset tax collectors, the Bureaucracy, recruiting officers, and every other plague. Finally, there were occasional discussions on neighboring landowners, one of whose daughters it might be advantageous to marry. As an additional safeguard against the Government, the looter and the spoiler, each marital alliance with a worthwhile family made for greater security when influence and bribery were required, whether for survival or for advancement.
Aside from the Kwan dwelling, which occupied a quarter of the entire walled enclosure, the rest of the village consisted of the inn, the cooked-food stall, a few shops, and the plaza, on which the dwellings of tenants and neighboring landowners fronted. When disbanded soldiers or bandits—the distinction between the two was purely academic—prowled the fringes of Shensi Province, the farmers manned the wall and repelled the would-be looters with flights of arrows and rockets.
Ju-hai had scarcely bathed and changed when the slave girl brought a tray crowded with spicy-sour soup, “pot stickers,” a smoked duck, steamed, and a miniature tub shaped from wooden staves; steam still escaped from the rice which the cover protected. Finally, there was a jug of shao-hsing, the yellow wine which tasted as if it had set out to be dry sack but had taken a few detours to a destination all its own.
Once Phoenix put the meal on the worktable with its clutter of books, brushes, brush holder, sticks of ink, and the slab for grinding ink, she fired up the charcoal brazier to heat water for after-supper tea.
Despite farm work, school, and enough time with Lan-yin, the joint concubine of the Kwan brothers, Ju-hai found Hsi-feng ever more disturbing. Her jacket, a hand-me-down from one of the Kwan women, was becoming a bit more snug, and the wearer a little more luxurious, yet short of opulent—an exciting understatement. And when not-so-little Phoenix bent over the table, meticulously careful in setting dishes out in a harmonious pattern, Ju-hai was quite too appreciative of her three-dimensional geometry to extemporize a verse. Leave that to Li Po! The devastation began when Phoenix half straightened up, slanted her glance, and moved the shao-hsing. Then, as if he had given her the final approval, she shifted it ever so slightly and contentedly wagged her head of ultimately black hair. She had done it exactly as it should have been done…the positioning of the rice wine, of course.
But the stray lock which sneaked almost to her left eyebrow, while the remainder of her bangs almost grazed her right, and the slantwise glance of amazingly luminous dark eyes…! The nice thing about it all was that Hsi-feng was very innocently being female. Only a female bungler or a supreme artist would have risked Hsi-feng’s instinctively perfect baiting.
Her eyelids were almost tangent to the pupil; and while she’d be eye-catching in any position, the angle was perfect and made the utmost of dainty features and fine facial contours. She was a lady, a very young one, but time would tend to that by refining and maturing an elegant beginning. From cheekbone to jaw was a smooth, squarish contour, tapering to a fine little chin.
Dimples lurked, and she almost smiled and then remembered the proprieties—
Ju-hai silently cursed his stupidity when, on the way from woodcutting, he’d told his brother, “I’ve got to work on those earrings for the Old Man’s Number One Lady—you take care of Lan-yin tonight.”
The most dangerous creature on earth was the human female, fully aware of her femaleness, and burning with the urge to try it out, to fascinate, devastate—
Quite aside from the Old Man’s views and warnings, Ju-hai’s own integrity and the Confucian ethics he’d been studying had kept him from approaching Phoenix. But for this accursed business of going to the capital to prepare for the Imperial Civil Service examinations, there was no reason why he should not have her; even though her family’s poverty and consequent unimportance made such a marriage useless as an alliance against the Government, hers was a good family, and the early Kwans had done well enough without any important alliances.
But a student was quite too busy to be handicapped by a wife; and by the time Ju-hai passed the examinations, Hsi-feng should be properly married. And if she lost her virginity, the Old Man could not arrange a marriage as good as he had agreed to.
He told himself that tomorrow night Lan-yin’s insatiable desires would make virtue quite easy. The fact was that when he was with the concubine of the Kwan sons, he’d begun to close his eyes and imagine that he was making love with Hsi-feng; and when Lan-yin had left him comfortably depleted, he still had a mental craving for Hsi-feng.
“Old Master, when you’ve eaten—shall I come back to brew your tea? Or may I serve your meal?”
“I don’t know what would be nicer—” He made a vague gesture to indicate papers and books. “Thank you, maybe tomorrow.”
Ju-hai was learning why the daughters of aristocratic families were guarded day and night until marriage.
Each regarded the other. He knew that she had seen through him; she knew that she had not been rejected. Not this night, not tomorrow, but she’d be back, and he’d eventually let Phoenix serve evening rice and stay until he gave permission for her to leave. And she’d not beg permission to depart; she’d wait for him to speak the words. Her eyes, dark and magnificent as never before, predicted and promised.
After a moment longer than propriety permitted, she modestly lowered her glance; with his permission, she left.
Ju-hai savored his final glimpse of the girl’s elegant backside. If Younger Brother weren’t so dumb, he could pass the examinations and Td he a happy farmer, he thought.
Though he ate heartily, the skill of the Szechuanese cook was wasted. He didn’t know whether he ate smoked duck or sorghum stalks. Abruptly, he got up and made for the jade shop adjoining the bedroom.
The shop centered about a workbench made of wood smoothly squared with