“Are you quite serious?” Jinshi asked. Across from him, a man reclined
on a couch. A middle-aged ruler with a prodigious beard, who now nodded slowly.
They were in a particular pavilion in the outer court. Small, but with excellent visibility; a mouse couldn’t have crawled in without them seeing it. The ruler leaned on his ivory-bedecked couch and poured grape wine into a glass vessel. Although he was sitting with the most august personage in the nation, Jinshi had also been quite at his ease. At least, until a moment ago.
The Emperor stroked his beard and grinned. Would it be rude of Jinshi to suggest he didn’t like it? But the beard looked very good on His Majesty. Jinshi couldn’t beat him in the facial hair department.
“So, what are you going to do now, O groundskeeper of our garden of lovely blossoms?”
Unwilling to rise to His Majesty’s bait, Jinshi held back a wry smile, instead offering one like that of a heavenly nymph—an expression that could have melted any heart he chose. It might not sound very humble, but Jinshi was confident in his own looks if nothing else.
What a great irony, then, that the one thing he truly wanted, he could not get. No matter how he strived, his aptitudes were hardly more than ordinary. Yet outwardly, if in no other way, he was utterly exceptional.
It had always used to eat at him, but he had come to accept it. If his intelligence and physical prowess were to be irredeemably average, then he would do all he could with the one advantage he did possess. Thus he came to be the gorgeous overseer of the rear palace. His looks, his voice, seemed too sweet to be those of any man, and he would employ them to the fullest.
“Whatsoever you wish, sire.” Jinshi, with a smile at once graceful and determined, bowed to the Emperor.
The Emperor sipped his wine and grinned in a way that invited Jinshi to
do his worst. Jinshi knew full well that he was no more than a child. A child dancing in the Emperor’s great palm. But he would do it. Oh yes, he would. He would entertain even His Majesty’s most outrageous wishes. That was Jinshi’s duty, as well as his wager with the Emperor.
He had to win that wager. It was the only way Jinshi would be able to choose his own path. Perhaps other ways existed. But a man of ordinary intelligence such as Jinshi couldn’t imagine them.
Thus he had chosen the road he now followed.
Jinshi brought his cup to his lips and felt the sweet fruit wine wet his throat, the heavenly smile never slipping from his face.
○●○
“Here you go. Take this, and this—oh, and you’ll need one of these.”
Maomao winced at all the stuff that came veritably flying at her. The one flinging the rouge and whitening powder and clothes in her direction was the courtesan Meimei. They were in her room at the Verdigris House.
“Sis, I don’t need any of this,” Maomao said, taking the cosmetics one
by one and returning them to their various shelves.
“Like fun you don’t,” Meimei said, exasperated. “Everyone else there is going to have even better stuff than this. The least you could do is try to look decent.”
“Only courtesans get this tarted up to go to work.”
Maomao had just glanced aside, privately wishing she could go mix those herbs she’d collected the day before, when a bundle of wooden writing strips came flying at her. Her esteemed older sister was solicitous, but sometimes short-tempered. “You finally get a job worth having, and you won’t even try to act like you belong there? Listen, the world is full of people who would kill to be in your place. If you aren’t grateful for what you’ve got, your hard-won clientele will run out on you!”
“Oh, very well…” Maomao said. Whether administered by the madam or Meimei, education in the Verdigris House could be a bit rough. But there was truth to what she said.
Maomao picked up the writing strips a bit sullenly. The wood was dark where it had been written on and then erased over and over; currently, it bore the words of a song, written in a delicate hand. Meimei was old enough to be thinking of retiring from courtesan’s work, but her intelligence saw her popularity continue to flourish. She could write songs, play Go and Shogi, and thereby entertain her clientele. She was one of those courtesans who sold not so much her body as her accomplishments.
“You’ve got a plum job now. Save up all the money you can make.” The wood-strip-flinging woman of a moment ago was gone, replaced by Maomao’s sweet, caring older sister. She stroked Maomao’s cheek with a manicured hand, tucking some errant hair behind her ear.
Ten months before, Maomao had been kidnapped and sold into service as a maid in the rear palace. Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined that after successfully making her way back to the pleasure district, she would once again go to work there. To those around her, it must have seemed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Hence the stern look in Meimei’s eyes.
“Yes, Sister,” Maomao said obediently after a moment, and Meimei smiled her graceful courtesan’s smile.
“I hope you’ll make more than just money. Make yourself a nice match with a fine man too, eh? There must be plenty of them just bursting with
cash there. Oh, and I would be thrilled if you’d bring a few of them by to be my customers.” The smile this time wasn’t so gracious; there was a distinct element of cold calculation to it. Her chuckling older sister looked a bit like the old madam who ran the place, Maomao reflected. A girl had to look out for herself to survive in this line of work.
Ultimately, Maomao found herself sent on her way with a large bundle packed to bursting with clothing and cosmetics. She worked her way back to her simple house, stumbling under the load.
The day when the gorgeous noble had appeared in the pleasure district two weeks after Maomao’s departure from the rear palace was still fresh in her memory. The eunuch, with his very particular proclivities, had— thankfully—heard the words Maomao had spoken half in jest and taken them in earnest. He had confronted the madam with more than enough money to cover Maomao’s debts and had even had the decency to bring a rare medicinal herb as a gift. It hadn’t taken even thirty minutes to stamp the contract.
So it was that Maomao was to resume her employment at that most renowned of workplaces. She was somewhat reluctant to leave her father again to go live in her place of employment, but the conditions imposed by her new contract were, as far as she could tell, much more lenient than before. Moreover, this time, she wouldn’t be simply disappearing without a trace. Her father had told her with a gentle smile to do what she wished, but then his face had briefly darkened when he looked at her contract. What had that meant?
“Looks like they were very generous,” Maomao’s father remarked, a
large pot of medicinal herbs boiling nearby. Maomao finally put down the cloth-covered bundle and stretched her shoulders. Their ramshackle house was so drafty that it was cold even with the fireplace lit, and she and her father were each wearing several layers. She caught him rubbing his knee, a sure sign that his old wound was paining him.
“I can’t take much of it with me,” Maomao said, looking at the cargo she’d already prepared. The mortar and pestle are musts, and I can’t do without my notebook. And I’m a little leery of getting rid of any more undergarments…
As Maomao frowned and grumbled, her father took the pot off the fire and came over. “My Maomao, I’m not so sure you can bring these with you,” he said, and plucked her mortar and pestle out of her bundle, earning a glare. “You’re no doctor. Try bringing these in, and they might figure you’re planning to poison someone. Come now, don’t look at me like that. You made this decision, and you can’t take it back now.”
“Are we sure about that?” Maomao slumped down onto the dirt floor.
Her father deduced at a glance what she was really trying to say. “All right now, finish your preparations and then get yourself to bed.
You can ask them to let you have your tools, just over time. It’d be rude not to be focused on your work, at least on the first day.”
“Yeah, fine…” Maomao grudgingly returned the apothecary’s implements to the shelf, then picked out a few of the most useful-looking parting gifts she’d received and put them in her bundle. She scowled at the whitening powder and the seashell full of blush, but eventually included the latter, which didn’t take up too much room. Among the gifts was an excellent padded cotton jacket. Maybe they’d taken the opportunity to foist something on her that a customer had forgotten; it certainly didn’t look like anything a courtesan would wear.
Maomao watched her father stash the pot away and put some wood on the fire. Then he hobbled over to his bed, a simple reed mat, and lay down. His bedclothes consisted only of another mat and a poor outer robe.
“When you’re finished, I’ll put out the light,” he said, pulling the fish-oil lamp close. Maomao packed the rest of her things, then went to tuck herself into her bed on the other side of the room. She was caught by a passing idea, though, and dragged her sleeping mat over toward her father’s.
“Well, now, it’s been a while since you did that. I thought you weren’t a child anymore.”
“No, but I am cold.” Was it a little too obvious, the way Maomao averted her eyes? She’d been, she recalled, about ten when she started sleeping by herself. It had been years. She stuffed the new cotton jacket between herself and her father and let her eyes drift shut. She rolled to one side and rounded her back, assuming a fetal position.
“Ah, it’s going to be lonely around here again,” her father said calmly. “Doesn’t have to be. This time I can come home whenever I want.”
Maomao’s tone was short, but she couldn’t help noticing the warmth of her
father’s arm against her back.
“Yes, of course. Do come back anytime.” A hand tousled her hair.
Father, she called him, Dad, Pops, but his appearance was closer to that of an old woman, and everyone agreed that his manner was motherly.
Maomao had no mother. Not as such. But she had her father who cared for her, and the yammering old madam, and her endlessly lively older sisters.
And I can come back and see them whenever I want. She could feel the warmth of her father’s hand, withered like an old branch, still stroking her hair as her breathing fell into the steady, even rhythm of sleep.
