between the two. He said something which Ju-hai no more than half understood.
“My father runs the village. Go in, get food, rest up, and later we’ll talk.”
“What you want?”
“Stick around and you’ll find out.”
The shaman made a grunting sound which might have been a word. “So you got troubles? Tax collector? Or who’s going to get your girl when you go in the army?”
“How do you know I got troubles?” Ju-hai challenged.
The broad face became shrewd. He said, good humouredly, “Nobody talks to me except when he’s in trouble up to his chin. All my life people tell me about troubles. So when I see a trouble-face, I know it.”
“How long you been a shaman?”
“Born that way. Some got to study how, but I wonder why anyone is so crazy and wants to be one when he don’t have to.”
Ju-hai nodded. “I don’t know a thing about shamanizing except what I’ve heard people say.”
“Then both ears are full of manure. If you got a question, you can’t ask me in this town.”
“Why not?”
“My spirit friend takes my body and talks for me; I am somewhere else. Before I go into open-eye sleep, there is drumming and chanting and whanging and then my spirit friend roars like a crazy thunderstorm, and every bastard in town knows what is being said.”
“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
