to tell you I’m Mei-yu. Yes, I rubbed out your inked sketch. It’s lovely but I had a better idea.”
Mei-yu—this meant true, precious, superlative jade. It also implied not-other-precious gems, such as were included in mere yu, jewels of all sorts, all of which were inferior to jade. If she had called herself Tai-yu, it would have been about the same as Mei-yu, but a bit on the grandiloquent side.
“Aiieeyah! You do know jade talk.” She was delighted and she gestured magnificently, all the more so because of sleeves which trailed to her knees when she spread her arms. He’d never seen a garment with such Imperial sleeves.
Mei-yu continued, “You had the darlingest design, and it was clever the way you got two earring blanks out of one small cutting of jade. The color veins contrast and at the same time harmonize, so the pendants will be mates but not duplicates—if you’d made ear pendants for your father to give his Number One Lady, you’d have embarrassed him and yourself—before you could shape a second pair, she and his other concubine would be enemies. And the Old Man has enough problems already.”
The Old Man’s one and only wife, Ju-hai’s mother, had died a good many years ago.
Mei-yu turned, and as if she had been blocking the moonlight, he clearly saw the lines sketched on the jade plaque.
“This is a single piece—it would make a beautiful pectoral, but the situation would be no different from a pair of ear pendants. You started a wine cup for your father—finish it, and when the plaque I designed is done, save it for a girl who doesn’t have a sister concubine to hate for being Number One.”
Mei-yu came nearer and for the first time he was aware of her perfume. Though the sweetness left him as if dizzy-drunk, he couldn’t help but wonder how he got the scent of this fascinating girl when he could not hear her voice.
“Old Master, that’s spirit-bouquet, and nose smelling has nothing to do with it. With all the problems you have for thinking about, why have wonderings about friend or lover? Do you have to understand me all at once—”
This was a declaration; it was as if she had parted curtains which concealed a realm of wonder.
Moonlight shifted from the workbench, leaving Ju-hai and Mei-yu in cozy darkness. Her warmth and the tantalizing touch of her body were a promise rather than a fact, an almost touching, from knee to breast and mouth to mouth, a moonbeam’s breadth short of completeness.
She gasped. “Don’t squeeze me—” Her dismay checked him. “I’m all moon-misty—kiss me a not-quite touch—” Her tongue traced the width of his mouth, and then, swaying half the distance that separated them, Mei-yu shaped the kiss. Ju-hai forgot her warning, but she evaded his arms, leaving him with an embrace of emptiness.
His exclamation made her recoil.
“I’m awfully sorry—I didn’t mean to tease you—it was a crazy impulse—I couldn’t help it, really, I couldn’t—I should have known you’d sense my wantings.”
“O mi to fu! What is—who are—what are you?”
“I don’t know what to tell you—” She came toward him, then checked herself; she opened and closed her hands, clutching air. “Aiieeyah! I’m crazy!”
Ju-hai outgrew his dismay and confusion when she wavered, on the verge of tears. “If you’re crazy, then what am I?”
She drew a deep breath. “I’m an Immortal—one of the servants of the Moon Goddess, Lady Chang Wo. She could not spare the time to see the Kwan Village Moon Festival last year, so she sent me to have a look and tell her all about it—and I got a sensing of you and how you love jade—I saw your work.”
Details bewildered Ju-hai, but a shade of sanity came to help.
“I met a man in a Taoist monastery—they said he was a hundred and eighty-one years old, but he looked about my age. When he sat on a cushion, it bulged from his weight. Everyone in the neighborhood knew he wasn’t a fraud—grandfathers remembered him.”
Mei-yu brightened. “Then you do understand enough to hear more. I’m not a Goddess like Lady Chang Wo, and I’m not solid like your tao-shih—there are different sorts of Immortals—from saints that still wear human bodies to the Pah Hsien, and Tien Hou, and Lady Hsi Wang Mu—well, I used to be a Buddhist nun.”
“So that’s why I shouldn’t kiss you. But your hair isn’t cut—your hood doesn’t hide it all. Why don’t you sit down?” He pointed to the bench. “You’ve let your hair grow.”
The cushion did not sink when she seated herself.
“Ju-hai, you’re precious! You’re fabulous! Keeping your wits about you that way! Of course the cushion doesn’t sink; I really have little weight; and in your world, I don’t have any.” She patted her hip. “Looks good, but simply not solid enough. None of me. Well, not yet.”
“But you changed my inked lines on the jade and you drew new lines.”
“You’re impossible! If I did have a solid body, you’d not love me to death, you’d question me out of existence! So I’ll tell you all about it. I was a nun and I did so much good work, as they call it, that the Emperor of Heaven made me an Immortal, and I went to work for Lady Chang Wo—jade is made of moonbeams, you know.”
“You make all the jade—”
“No, I race around wherever jade is found in the entire world and I see to it that the elemental spirits who turn moonbeams into jade do their work properly—and—and—” Mei-yu rose to her feet and laid a hand on his wrist. Her eyes were misty, glowing, a luminous, dark wonder. “I was a virgin when I became an Immortal; I’ve never had a lover—and you’re wondering just how—”
“With a Buddhist nun, o mi to fu! But with a Goddess—”
“Ju-hai, I’m not a nun, haven’t been for years, and I’ve never been a Goddess. I’m simply a woman, only not as solid as Lan-yin.”
“But I’m not an Immortal—do I have to—”
She swayed toward him. “We’re going to meet again; and next time, you won’t have to wonder how to become as frail as I am now.”
Mei-yu reteated to the court. He stood for moments before he could accept the fact that somewhere short of the shadows of a bamboo she had become entirely moon glamour enveloped by darkness.
Chapter III
As usual, Lan-yin and her husband, Chen Lao-yeh, were haggling some well-worn subject. That evening the topic was their son, Chen Yin-chu, recently conscripted because of trouble in Turkistan. The Chens were speculating on how lavish was the bribe which Old Man Kwan had offered the captain to make sure that neither Ju-hai nor Younger Brother, Shou-chi, would be taken into the army.
The brothers had been in the next higher foothills of the Tai Pai Shan, cutting firewood, as everyone knew. The debate centered on how it had happened that the Kwan sons were away just when the recruiting officer made his rounds.
Each villager, male or female, slave or free, was listed on the census rolls. Law required that on the door of every house there must be a list of the dwellers. The captain, after declaring that he’d pick up the missing on his way back and en route to Ch’ang-an,
