sense enough to pay the jailer of the nearest city a reasonable sum, whereupon every prisoner, regardless of offense, would become a soldier. The jailer split the cumshaw with the magistrate. The officer was reimbursed for expenses in getting the recruits missing the first time around, and all balanced out.
Chen Lao-yeh had automatic responses which made it seem that he was listening to his wife, who was busy in an adjoining room. Although Master Chen, who was nudging his fortieth year, wore the dark blue jacket and knee length pants of the Shensi farmer, there was something about his easy, graceful posture, his long slender hands, and his thin, sensitive face which gave the overall impression that this man normally wore the robe and cap of scholar and for some unspecified reason was disguising himself. The few lines of his smooth face were about the eyes, and largely sun squint. His expression was benevolent, serene, and his attention, like his gaze, was far away from the little farmhouse with its rammed earth floor and whitewashed walls.
The Chens had done nicely; he and his late father had put undeveloped farmland into production, starting as had the Kwans, though three centuries later. And a good deal still depended on his temporarily soldiering son.
Lan-yin was busy. Between dipping a finger into the pot of water heating over the coals of the hearth, then dipping strings of cash from a more or less secret wall niche, slapping them on the table, and all the while declaring herself to her husband, the mistress of the house was fully occupied.
Now that the crypt was emptied, the strings of cash were heaped, and the water sufficiently hot, Lan-yin grabbed the pot and, without skipping a beat, headed for the adjoining room. There she outvoiced her splashings in the little tub until at last she paused in the tirade. His Honor, Chen, who was unaware that she had changed the subject several times, felt that it was time to say something.
“You’re going to be with one of the Kwan sons this evening?”
“If you’d been listening to what I was saying, you’d know that Ju-hai is going to Ch’ang-an to study for the examinations and the Old Man wants him to sleep with that little snip of a slave girl, that Hsi-feng, so he’ll get used to doing it with a lady—mind you, a lady slave girl!”
While she was laughing that one off, Chen prepared his retort. “And since when,” he asked with elaborate smoothness, “has Old Man Kwan begun telling you his plans? When he finally got you knocked up and you spewed out that son of yours, he had his fill of you.”
“Your Excellency, Master Chen, in the first place the Kwan sons are more fun than he ever was, and in the second place, his Number Two Concubine told me all about the plans for Ju-hai to go to the capital to study for the Imperial Civil Service.”
Every once in a while Chen won a round, so he pursued his opportunity. “And of course the concubine knew all about Hsi-feng? Mmmm… She is getting to be luscious and I bet Ju-hai is drooling. The change will do him good.”
“You’d never get as much as a look, much less a smell of that!” Lan-yin mocked. “And so you think I was waiting for concubine chatter? The other night Ju-hai woke up and still more than half asleep, he called me Hsi-feng; and then, when he was fully awake, he felt awkward and told me all about the girl and how he was going to persuade his father to send her to Ch’ang-an to keep house for him.”
Chen snorted. “Anyone persuading Old Man Kwan to do anything has his life’s work cut out for him.”
“Whether he can or can’t talk his father into line, I’ll not be collecting as many strings of cash for you to buy silver in Ch’ang-an.”
Lan-yin could buy silver in the village market, but that would tell the entire village how much she was hoarding. The total which she had amassed since the Kwan boys had been interested in women was buried where only Lan-yin knew. The arrangement, having become a tradition, was hallowed, accepted by the villagers as entirely respectable. This, of course, was because of their politely pretending to ignore Lan-yin’s being a polyandrous concubine.
Trying to estimate the effects of Ju-hai’s leaving the village and going to the capital alone to study, and then to repeat the calculation, after taking into account Hsi-feng’s entering the Kwan heir’s life, kept Chen too busy to get more than scraps of what his wife was saying.
And there was another factor which for some while had contributed to Chen’s cogitations: it was an outright nuisance, keeping his concubine in a neighboring village—it was not so much the distance as simply the principle of the thing. He’d gain face if ever he moved his Number Two Lady into the Kwan Village. The house was large enough. The only obstacle was Lan-yin.
Then he realized that she was and had been saying things.
“You splash so much I missed something. What did you say?”
“I said you’re missing the point of everything! Don’t argue with me, shut up and get the facts! Once Ju-hai gets accustomed to a lady, he’ll realize that it takes three of her to equal one of me!”
Chen was about to dispute that estimate, but his Number One Lady interrupted. “Once he’s passed the examinations—”
Chen triumphantly shouted her down. “He can’t even take them for another two or three years.”
That was more than a patient woman could endure. Lan-yin pounced from the bathing room, towel in one hand, fresh garments in the other. “If Ju-hai makes it and gets an official position, we won’t have a chance to get anywhere—the Kwans will gobble up more and more land!”
“They can’t take what we have; and, with that buried silver, we can get a red certificate for uncleared land.”
“What makes you so sure?” she challenged, flipping the towel into a corner and sorting an undergarment from the outer jacket and trousers draped over the crook of her elbow.
They had wrangled so many years that her unusually attractive body didn’t interest him. Whereas the years made haggard wrecks of so many women, there was a significant proportion of ageless ones with timeproof bodies and unblemished chinlines; when these favored ones nudged fifty and more, their smooth skins were finer of texture than any female teen-age barbarian. And Lan-yin was one of these. Farm work had left her legs elegant, without knots. Aside from a few fine, white stretch lines, she was as unblemished as she’d been a good nineteen or twenty years previously.
“What makes me so sure?” Chen echoed. “Just a rough estimate.”
“We could buy twice as much land if you’d not squandered so much on part-time, unwashed village whores! You’re so used to wenches carrying honey buckets to the fields till they’re too tired to wash up, the minute I take a bath you think I’m sleeping with one of the Kwan boys.
“And before I forget it—when you go marketing in Ch’ang-an, I’m going along to make sure you don’t let that Colonel Tsao talk you into something stupid. He was getting impatient, last time he came to see us.”
Lan-yin referred to the retired Colonel Tsao’s talk with them at their farm, some distance from the walled village. To have him come to their home would have been fatally conspicuous.
“I don’t see where we come in on his impatience. We’re not selling property. He ought to know that; he must know by now. He’s after a chunk of Kwan land.”
Lan-yin sighed, praying for patience. “Chen Lao-yeh, before, he finds out that Ju-hai is going to school in Ch’ang-an, you and I are going to let him in on something important, if he gives us a commission.
