[continuing chapter 1]
For a moment, stopping just beside the doorway, Wen stopped
and looked back to the fighting. The
rebel appeared to be enjoying himself, bellowing like an ox as he tossed or
kicked away assailants. It was no wonder
all eyes were on him and nobody paid the slightest attention to Wen Xia. Which was just the way it ought to be, as far
as Wen Xia was concerned.
"Are you going to just stand there, gawking like some
idiot up-country peasant?" Number
One Grandfather raised a spectral hand to strike at his head, but held back
when Wen waved the flaming broom at him.
Which was absurd, given that Number One Grandfather wasn't in any state
of vulnerability to fire. Perhaps
spirits occasionally forgot themselves.
"Thank you for your help, Grandfather," Wen
said. "But I think I'm the best
judge now of how to save myself."
Taking a deep breath, he dashed out into the courtyard. As soon as he was outside he began waving the
broom and shouting, "Fire!
Fire! The magistrate's chambers
are on fire!" This was probably
unnecessary, given the smoke that was by now billowing from the doorway, but
Wen hoped it would help to spread a little bit of panic, to say nothing of
dissuading listeners from paying too much attention to where Wen was going as
he shouted his alarm.
The tribunal was situated on one of the hills above the
capital city, and as Wen emerged through the front gate, continuing to play the
helpful citizen, he could see the entirety of the city spread below him. Měijing was built on a series of low, gently
rolling hills that descended from a plateau down to the harbor, and atop each
hill was a series of mansions, each surrounded by the green of trees and shrubs
that indicated a perfectly proportioned and positioned garden. In the valleys between the hills lived the
grain-merchants and cloth traders—the higher up your valley the more money you
had loaned to aristocrats and therefore the more socially respectable you were,
at least within the highly disreputable merchant class. And down at the bottom, around the harbor,
lived the poor whose work made Měijing run, and whose poverty made them more or
less immune to the sort of business Wen Xia had been indulging in lately.
Beyond the harbor, and a possible aid to his escape, was the
warm blue-green Eastern Sea. Though of
course in Fusang it should by rights be called the Western Sea, since China was
beyond the setting sun from this colony.
Only the rigid strictures of Confucianism would force an entire nation
to insist that west was east.
Wen's preference was to look to the harbor as a means of
leaving the capital. There were always
coastal traders in port, and Father's sad attempts to make a living by fishing
had at least ensured that his son had developed good sea legs and some facility
with the duties required on the smaller sorts of ships. This morning, though, the only craft visible
were a brace of sea falcons, small fighting ships in the service of the
Ming. No point in trying to sign on to
one of those.
So it was to the eastern hills, then, that he'd have to
turn. There were native villages inland,
mixed with farming towns and the manors of huge estates, and perhaps by making
his way through the hills he could get to the north, to the frontier.
After that, who knew what would happen? Walking briskly down the road to where he
could turn onto the prince's High Road, Wen tried to think about what life
would be like on the northern frontier.
There was plenty of gold in the hills around Jīn-sè Mèn—whose name,
after all, meant City of the Gate of Gold—but Wen wasn't really interested in a
life of mining. He'd had more than
enough of scratching in the earth for a living, and if anything mining
threatened to be worse than farming. He
could read and write, but studying for exams wasn't an option, either: the
civil service exams were a ludicrous matter of parroting what generations of
sages had to say, not of establishing one's own ability to think or to process
ideas. He had seen what studying for
exams had done to his father, and nothing more on that subject need be shown to
him.
So what should he do?
Theft was the obvious answer, had been for the past year or so, but—as
this morning had shown—thievery in large cities carried considerable risks; and
where there were no risks to speak of, there was nothing worth stealing either. There was no more point in stealing from
peasants than there was in stealing from the poor of Měijing; for one thing
they had little of interest, and for another Wen had lived like a peasant for
long enough that he had developed a hearty dislike for those who would take
what little those people had.
He was walking, aware that as the extent of his dilemma had
occurred to him his pace had decreased, when he heard the drum-beat of hooves
behind him. Cursing himself for a
daydreaming idiot, Wen was looking for a hedge into which he could dive when he
suddenly found himself airborne. When he
saw the giant hand and arm wrapped around his midriff he knew what had
happened.
So when Chin Gwai shouted, "I'm glad to see that we're
both going the same way!" Wen was able to reply, with a calm he didn't
feel:
"What took you so long?"
Next Prologue Chapter 1
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