Chu, do not persist. Remember the saying ‘if you see an uncanny thing and do not regard it as such, its uncanniness will disappear.’ You are fortunate. Not only did the great Shu laureate come back to harmonize a poem with you, but she left you a scroll to prove it, a literary masterpiece, which will make you rich and famous.”
“I will never sell it.”
“No, I imagine not.” Magistrate Wu-tsung sighed. “Still you have it there, in her handwriting and yours. Men will believe what they are forced to concede.”
“Sir,” T’ien Chu said, “you have been very patient with the ravings of this stupid person from the beginning.”
“I said you were fortunate. You came before the one official who might hear you sympathetically. I too…in my day…when I was young…harmonized a poem with the Chance Met Lady. But my verses were bad. We destroyed the scroll.”
After a long pause T’ien Chu said reflectively, “One thing…”
“Another?”
“I remember that she said she would give me some of the paper when I came back. And she said again, or she agreed when I said it, I don’t remember exactly…”
“So soon?”
“I was very drunk,” he said defensively. “But I think she said that I would come back and harmonize more poems… Did she…?”
“Yes, she also said that to me. I think of it sometimes. And so will you, T’ien Chu.”
PART TWO
CIRCA 760–780 A.D.
IV
BEYOND THE WALL turbulence went rushing by like the River Min, but this was a river of feet, surging into the city. Sometimes the sound was cut by sudden stridencies, laughter, shouted words, street vendors’ cries. Mostly it flowed on, a water noise, not friendly like the fishponds in the court, dangerous, deep water.
Behind the wall the safe world was laid out, orderly, with paths to the pavilions, flower beds, and shrubs. Life moved through the garden. Birds flashed by. People came and went, her mother and the other women, aunts and maids; children ran and quarreled, her brothers, who would never play with her; sometimes a man in stiff silk robes rustled gorgeously, her father, to whom they all behaved as stiffly as the robes, as though they were afraid.
She was not afraid. She had a secret strength. When they were alone she could make her father smile. She could even make him laugh and call her teasing names. In front of the others he ignored her. She was a misfortune, inexplicably, for no one would explain it to her, born to be a girl.
But still she was the small daughter of the House of Hsueh, and she was not afraid, of her father, of the world over the wall, of anything. Her official name was Hsueh T’ao, but they called her mostly by her small name, Hung Tu, and she was seven years old, born, the women said, a long way from this garden.
She remembered, or from hearing the women she coaxed tell of it, thought she remembered, snatches of that journey from far-off Chang-an, taken when she was two. There, in the farthest east of the Empire she was born, in the great Capital, Red Phoenix City, glory of the Tang, where the Emperor reigned with all his court…“friend and protector of your father.”
“Why then did we leave?”
“I’ve told you.”
“Tell me again.”
It was a story that could always make her “be good and go to sleep,” “be good and eat your rice,” “be good and stop your pestering, play quietly.”
There was a rebellion. Rebels came and sacked the Imperial City.
“I’ve told you what sacked means.”
The songs the women sang to her, the tales they told, were full of heroic deeds by the Emperor’s warriors against Barbarians in the North. There was always war and trouble from the North, but this time it was in the East, in the Capital itself, and it was not Barbarians, it was the Emperor’s own army that rose up against him and sacked and looted the city and sacked and looted the Palace. It was mutineers.
“What is mu…”
“Hush, Pestilence, and let me do my work.”
The Hsuehs fled. So did the Emperor and his court, but the important thing was that the Hsuehs fled, and the most important thing of all was that they carried her with them.
Over hills, on horseback, by palanquin…
“What’s pala…”
“Never you mind.”
By boat, and across scorched plains on foot, through passes where the narrow road clung to the precipice, up cliffs so high you couldn’t see the sky, on roads of ladders, and bridges hooked together in the air…
“The yellow crane could not fly over these mountaintops, and the monkeys wail, unable to leap over these gorges; alas how precipitous, alas how high! The road to Shu is more difficult to climb than the steep blue heavens,” her father quoted. “That was written for us by the poet Li Po.”
“I know,” Elder Brother said smugly. “My brother and I are studying the works of my father’s friend Li Po.”
Hung Tu might have added that she was studying them too, but at ten she had learned to be silent. There was a value in silence. The privilege of studying the classics with her brothers was a most unusual indulgence. She was nervous that it might be taken from her.
The first time that she marched into the Pavilion of Calm Studies with her brush and scroll and sat down expectantly, her brothers, especially Elder Brother, protested hotly. She was a girl. She had no business there. Honorable Tutor must turn her out at once. But Honorable Tutor was amused, or else he had an inkling of what her father would say.
“Let the small dragon stay,” her father said. “She will tire of it soon enough.”
When she proved him wrong, he shrugged, as her brothers had to learn to shrug, and she was allowed to practice script and master characters according to p’ai-lü, so long as she kept quiet, in the background where she belonged, and so long as she was properly admiring of her brothers’ brushwork and did not put forward her own.
When the day came to advance to a study of the even and uneven tones of the five-character lines of the classics, there was another protest and a much stronger one. This time Elder Brother had a sharper weapon against her. This time she had made a great mistake. She had shown her first completed poem to Honorable Tutor, and he had read it aloud, pointing out the beauty of the brushwork and the sound composition of the form. It was called “Now Alighted.”
Now alighted on the shadowy pooltwo birds float together on the green water. They rest as one, they move as one, they cannot be parted, whose hearts and minds and bodies know only each other, who have never had a dissenting thought. Even the leaves and the rushescling
