Chapter 10: Not a Fish

Nobody on the barge so much as coughed.

Mei stood at the rail with her arms still folded, because she'd forgotten to unfold them, and looked across nine boats at her own ferry, where Zhicheng was bent at the cabin door in her green sleeves with the lamplight on her. Zhicheng stayed bent at the door. Inside the cabin, nothing stirred either. Mei could feel the whole court waiting, every courtier in his watery robe, every guard on one knee, the Steward with his whiskers gone stiff as wire, the scholar at his lacquer table with his brush in the air and a drop of ink trembling on the end of it.

Under the temple roof, the Dragon King had turned his head.

He was looking at the ferry. Mei saw his face in the lantern light, long and ivory and lined, and saw the gold eyes in it, and saw them narrow, the way you narrow your eyes at a voice you know and have decided not to know.

Zhicheng straightened up.

She turned round on Mei's boards with her hands folded in her sleeves, and lifted her pointed chin, and called back across the water in a clear, sweet, perfectly steady voice:

"It's a cat, Majesty."

The court stared at her.

"The ferrywoman's cat," said Zhicheng. "It's old. It talks." She paused, and Mei, from across nine boats, saw her swallow. "It's an unusually well-read cat."

It was a dreadful lie, and Mei knew dreadful lies: she had heard Auntie Tang explain where the extra tenth went on paper-money day.

The Dragon King considered the ferry, and then Mei. She looked back at him, because she didn't know what else to do, and tried to make her face say cat, and was fairly sure it said eel trap.

The old gold eyes rested on her, tired, with something else far down in them, there and gone before she could name it.

"Cats."

The Dragon King turned back to the moon, and the bells on the corners of the roof began, one by one, to ring again. "The ode," he said.

The scholar wrote as if the brush were on fire.

He had stolen the line. Mei watched him do it. He wrote The water keeps the moon as the lake keeps the drowned, in a quick shaking hand, and stopped, and looked at it, and went pale. Then something took hold of him, as a current takes a drifting boat, and he wrote the next line without stopping, and the next, and the drink went out of his face and something else came into it. He didn't look up again until he was done. The moon was a finger's width from the hills.

He read it out. His voice cracked on the first line and steadied on the second. Mei didn't understand most of it, but there was a lot about silver, and some about loneliness, and one part in the middle about a lantern on a boat at night that made Zhicheng, who had come back across the boats to stand at the rail, put her hand over her mouth.

When he finished, the whole barge sat braced, as if for a blow. The Dragon King sat with his face to the moon. It touched the hills while they waited. It slid down behind them, slowly, a sliver at a time, like a coin going into a purse, until there was only a thin white rim of it showing above the black line of the ridge.

"The third line," he said, "is not his."

The scholar went the color of the paper.

"He borrowed it," said Mei, before she could stop herself. "You borrowed my boat."

The Steward made a noise like a catfish being stepped on.

The old man didn't turn round. But his shoulders, under the white and silver, moved once, as if something in them had given way.

"So I did," said the Dragon King. "Let him keep his head. Pay the ferrywoman." The rim of moon went behind the hills, and the lanterns on the water began, one by one, to go out. "And give the cat," he said, "my compliments on the third line."

The boats went home before the light.

Mei didn't see how it happened; she was standing on her own ferry again, she didn't remember climbing back, and the mist had closed, and the music had started up, faint and far, and the ferry was moving under her feet. Zhicheng was gone. The scholar was asleep on the cushions of Old Hu's pleasure boat, which was tied to her stern by a green silk ribbon. He was holding a single embroidered stocking against his chest, the bitten one, and smiling in his sleep like a fool.

Under the stern bench, where her grandfather had said it would be, there was a silver ingot. She weighed it in her palm. It was worth about four hundred coppers. Next to it, folded in a square of green silk, were sixty coppers exactly, for the stocking, and a slip of paper with a drawing on it of a cat.

Four hundred and sixty coppers. She did the sum twice. It made the seventy-five he owed her look like a joke, and she found she didn't want to say so.

She sat down on the bench with the silver in one hand and the coppers in the other, and found that her knees were shaking.

The prince came out of the cabin.

He came out slowly, on his hands and knees, and unfolded himself, and stood up in the gray. The net was still round one ankle. He kicked it off. He didn't look at her. He went and stood at the side of the ferry and looked out at the mist where the barge had been, with his arms at his sides, and his fingers opening and closing, as if there were something in them he'd dropped.

"Zhicheng told me," said Mei. "She came back to the rail during the ode and said it in my ear. She said you weren't supposed to be in this part of the lake at all." She turned the ingot over. "She said you'd been sent away."

He kept his eyes on the mist.

"Fish."

"A year ago," he said, to the mist. "This spring a year ago. My father arranged a marriage for me. A princess of West Lake. Suitable. Old family. I said I wouldn't." His voice was flat. "Nobody says won't to my father. He sent me to the river mouth. To the salt water, at the bottom of the delta, where nothing lives but crabs and nobody visits. To think about it."

"For how long?"

"Until I'd thought about it."

"So what were you doing up here," said Mei, "in my net?"

"Not today," said the prince.

Mei studied his back.

"And had you?"

"I'd thought about it every day for a year," said the prince. "I still wasn't going to marry her." He turned round. In the gray light his face had no color in it and his eyes were too bright, and he looked about fifteen. "That's what my father didn't look at, just now," said the prince. "A son who said won't, behind a box of paper money. He knew it was me. You saw him. He knew, and he said cats."

"He gave you his compliments."

"He gave the cat his compliments."

"Well," said Mei. "You were the cat."

He stared at her.

"And you could have kept your head in the box," said Mei. "Nobody would have known."

"It was a bad line." He looked away at the mist. "He was going to die for a bad line."

She held out her hand. Not the one with the silver. The other one, empty.

"Give me your arm," she said.

"Why?"

"Because you've pulled two pieces off it in ten days and it looks like a plucked chicken, and I'm not having a passenger bleed on my boards. Give it here."

He hesitated. Then he came and sat down on the bench beside her, which he had never done, and held out his left arm.

She took his wrist. It was cold, as it always was, the cold of river stone. There were two raw patches on the inside, where he had torn them away, one healed pink, one still shiny and weeping a little at the edges. She reached behind her for the box under the bench, the one with the needles and the twine and the little pots of grease, and opened the pot of goose grease with her thumb, and began to spread it on, one patch and then the other, with one finger.

He sat very straight beside her on the bench with his arm across her knees and watched the mist.

"You're not a fish," said Mei, after a while.

"I have been telling you that," said the prince, "for ten days."

"I know. I didn't believe you." She smoothed the grease over the second patch. "I thought you were a fish who'd got above himself. I didn't think you were really..." She stopped. She didn't know what she'd been going to say. A prince. Somebody's son. Somebody who'd been sent away and minded.

His wrist had turned under her fingers. She didn't know when. His palm was up now, open, and her hand was lying in it, and neither of them had done it.

Their two hands lay palm to palm. His was long and pale, and hers was brown and square, with the white rope scar across it, and grease on the fingers. His thumb moved, barely, along the side of her hand.

Mei took her hand back.

She did it quickly, and wiped the grease off on her trousers, and put the lid back on the pot, and looked for something to do, and found the box under the bench still open, and saw the rag at the bottom of it, rolled round something long. She'd moved it there from under her bedroll on the twenty-second, after the fletcher.

"Here," she said. Her voice came out loud. "I meant to ask you. I've been meaning to ask you since the twenty-second. Look at this."

She unrolled the rag. The black arrow lay in her lap, long and straight, with its iron head still dark with his blood, and the gray feathers at the end of it, three of them, long and soft and barred faintly with darker gray, like rain seen through a window.

"It's a good arrow," she said. "I was going to sell it. Four coppers, maybe five. But the fletcher in the county town had never seen feathers like that. I asked him on the twenty-second." She held it up. "Do you know what bird they're from?"

The prince studied the gray barred feathers. He didn't touch them.

"You knew," said Mei.

"I hoped I was wrong." He looked at the feathers a moment longer. "They're storm-heron. They nest on one cliff, at the head of the lake, above the thunder falls. Nobody hunts them. Nobody's allowed to." He reached out, at last, and touched one of the feathers with the tip of one finger, lightly, as if it might still be hot. "Only one person in these waters fletches his arrows with storm-heron."

"Who?"

The prince took his finger away.

"My brother," he said. "The Third."