beautiful the texture is,” he said, fingering it. “I have never seen a paper as smooth and strong as this. It invites the brush.”
She smiled. “Do you like fine paper, T’ien Chu?”
“Yes. Because I am a poet.” He shrugged.
“I will give you some. It is made here at our Hundred Flowers Pool. The water at this bend of the Silk River has a special quality. Each of these sheets has been separately dipped into the stream.”
“It is beautiful,” he repeated.
He was thinking, “If I compose the first line I will introduce the theme of love and the passing of time and then I can sing to her of the new turmoil in my heart. But if she begins…”
She smiled as though she caught his thought.
“You first, T’ien Chu.”
“Very well.”
He wrote down the title:
“‘Harmonizing a poem with the Chance Met Lady.’”
He thought for a long moment.
“Loveliness and compassion cannot be grasped.”
He brushed the column down strongly, with bold, thick strokes. Then he pushed the paper toward her. She leaned over his shoulder to brush in the next line:
“The turning year shakes the earth, petals drift…” Her script was like her music, complex, detailed, ordered, each glyph complete, a miniature picture, perfect in itself, even without the poem’s meaning. No slovenly short cuts or concessions. Few scholars wrote like this today. He wondered how she had acquired the patience and the skill. She was a challenging poet. She had taken the general statement in his line and made it concrete with “shakes the earth” and “petals.” Petals blown on the wind, petals from the flowering trees. He would make it harder for her than this. He would put those fallen petals in a specific place and bring her in obliquely…
“flinging a crimson pathway for satin-slippered feet.” What would she do with that?
“or cover the ground like frost.”
Oh, clever, to bring in the frost, to make loveliness of death, and turn his lament for the fallen into a triumph of escape! But this was leading them a little off the track. He returned to the passing of time, and the need to seize upon love…
“All that is exquisite and frail is evanescent…”
She hesitated. Then:
“perfume dispelled, cannot be recalled.
No ghosts of these torn buds will haunt us.”
Those were strange lines…something poignant, unexpected there… Chance Met… Chance Met…he leaned toward her urgently.
“There is a lifetime to make up between us,” he said. “All the long, lonely hours of this person’s life…”
“But not in one short evening, T’ien Chu. Now that you have come here, you will come again.”
This must mean that she liked him, that he was not just the guest of an evening, imposed on her by the Governor.
“I will come here many times,” he said exultantly.
“And harmonize poems with me. That will be a pleasure, T’ien Chu. It is too long a time since I composed a new poem.”
“Two or three days?” he teased her. “A moon at least, I suppose?”
“Centuries. Let us continue. The lines we have brushed are good. It is your turn to stir up the petals.”
“They shimmer in sun. They wilt under rain.”
“They fall into the upraised cup of the poet.”
“There they go, into my cup, and I am drunk again, but not with wine. I am drunk with joy of you…”
“Into the poet’s enameled cup falls the rarest flower of all.”
“As a dream melts away, they mingle with the yellow catkin of the willow.”
“Versatile petals. They go everywhere, on every wind. Shall we bring them to rest?”
“Not yet, T’ien Chu.”
“Very well. Hold them against loneliness.”
“Let them stay where they have fallen”
“on the steps, on the path into the garden.”
“This color is balm for one abandoned”
“who wakes in night and walks in the rustling leaves.”
Long lonely night.
The short shared night wore on as they scribbled furiously together, in a fusion of mind and spirit that obliterated everything for him, even the passing of the hours. It was near dawn when the sleeping mat was finally spread and he stumbled into her arms.
II
HE WOKE TO PAIN AND NOISE. Someone was kicking him, someone was shouting. He was lying, naked, on a pile of heaped-up leaves. He sat up groggily. Two angry men stood over him…soldiers…
“Wha…wha…where?”
They struck him. They yanked him to his feet. They were rough-looking brutes with mean faces. One of them, the older, had a scar across his lips that puckered them into a sneer.
“If those are yours, get into them,” this Scarface said, tossing him a bundle scooped up from the ground.
They were his clothes. He groped to put them on, shaking with shock, with fear.
“I don’t understand… I don’t understand…”
He saw his pack a few feet away, hanging from a bush, and stumbled toward it. It was still fastened. He loosened the straps and looked in. His purse was there. He had not been robbed. But something terrible had happened…
“How did I get here?”
Scarface clouted him savagely across the mouth.
“Quiet, Scum!”
The other man laughed. “How did I get here?” he said mincingly. Then they both guffawed.
They took his arms and began to hustle him forward, through a crowd of curious, watching people who made no effort to help him. They halted for a moment, stared, and went hurrying about their business, while new ones came and stared.
He tried to appeal to the nearest. “Wait…wait…these soldiers
