Chapter 5: The Man Who Beats the Fish

The Eighth Prince of the waters could not pole a ferry.

He had told her he could. He had stood on the landing the morning of the twentieth with her spare pole in his hand, holding it like a spear, and said that he had been raised in the deepest palace on the lake and had commanded tides since before her grandfather's grandfather was born, and that he imagined he could manage a flat-bottomed tub with eleven patches in it.

Mei had said, "Twelve. You split another one." And then she'd let him.

The first crossing took most of the morning. He drove the pole in too far out and too hard, as if the lake bottom had insulted him, and it stuck, and the ferry went on without it, and he went on with the ferry for a little way, holding on to the pole with both hands and leaning out farther and farther over the water, until he had to choose. He chose the pole. Mei fished him out with the boathook. The farmers in the middle of the boat, who had been on the ferry when it turned over two days before and had not wanted to get on again, held on to the benches with both hands and watched him the whole way.

On the second crossing he got the pole out of the mud and used it on the wrong side, and the ferry turned in a slow, stately circle in the middle of the lake, twice, while the egg woman on the landing laughed until she had to sit down.

On the third crossing he did it right. Nearly right. He had found the rhythm, the long push and the walk back and the reach, and the ferry was going straight, more or less, and he was standing in the stern with his blue-black hair tied back in a strip of old net and his too-short sleeves pushed up past the elbow, and the tendons stood out in his wrists with the effort of looking as if he weren't trying. He looked, Mei thought, almost like a ferryman. A tall, offended one.

"You're pushing it like you're trying to kill it," she said from the bow.

"I am pushing it as it is meant to be pushed."

"It's a pole. It isn't meant anything. It's a stick." She leaned back on her elbows on the bench, which was where passengers sat, and which she had not sat on since she was a child. It was comfortable. It was extremely comfortable. She could see why people paid. "Lean, don't shove. Let the boat come to you."

"The boat," said the prince through his teeth, "is not coming to me. The boat is going to the left."

"Then lean right."

He leaned right. The ferry went straight. He looked so startled that she nearly laughed, and bit it back, and did sums instead. Forty for the hen, two for the wick, thirty for the patch and the oarlock, the carpenter said. She had worked it out on her fingers the night before. At two coppers a day, which was what she'd decided he was worth, he would be free of debt to her somewhere around the start of the fifth month.

He would be free of her before then, of course. He'd save her life and go home, and the debt would go home with him, unpaid. She had thought about that too, lying awake in the cabin. She'd decided she'd charge it to his father.

At the first watch she poured the cup.

She'd poured it every night since the fish. Four nights. She had filled it to the brim and leaned over the side and tipped it into the dark water and said the words, the way her mother always had, and every night the water had taken the wine and given nothing back: no ripple, no round wet face, no You're late.

The first night she'd thought he was sulking. Liulang sulked sometimes, when she'd beaten him down too far on a price. The second night she'd thought he was drunk somewhere. The third night she had lain awake. On the fourth she had poured him a double, which was an outrageous waste of wine, and said into the water, "I'm not angry. Whatever it is. I'm not even going to charge you for the last two." Nothing.

Tonight she filled the cup and held it over the side and didn't pour it yet.

"He's not coming," she said.

The prince was sitting in the bow with his knees drawn up and the blanket round him. He'd said little since supper, which was rice and greens again for both of them, because she was not going to buy salt fish she couldn't eat in front of him and she wasn't going to eat the greens alone, and he had not said thank you for that either.

"Who," he said.

"Liulang. He beats the fish into my net. I pay him in wine." She turned the cup in her fingers. "He's dead. He drowned. He's waiting in the water for his..." She stopped. "He comes every night. He hasn't come since you."

The prince was slow to speak. Then he said, in a voice she hadn't heard from him before, flatter and more careful: "A drowned man."

"Yes."

"Who waits in this water."

"Yes. What..."

"Pour it," said the prince. "And step back from the side."

She glanced at him. He didn't glance back, but watched the black water beyond the edge of the lamplight, and his face had gone flat and closed, a look she was learning to read.

She poured it.

"For the ones down there," she said.

The wine went into the lake. And this time the water moved. Not near the boat. Far out, at the edge of the light, where the gold on the water broke up into darkness, something came up just far enough for its eyes to show. Then it sank again, slowly, and a long ripple came in toward the ferry and slapped once against the hull.

"Liulang!"

Nothing.

Mei rounded on the bow. "What did you do?"

"I did nothing."

"He's frightened of you."

"Of course he's frightened of me," said the prince. "I'm the son of the king of these waters. He's a drowned man in them. When my family comes up to a boat, someone usually goes down." He got up. He came down the length of the ferry with the blanket trailing behind him, and stood beside her at the side, and looked out at the place where the eyes had been. Then he raised his voice, not much, and it went out over the water like a skipped stone. "You. Drowned man. Come up. I won't hurt you."

The lake gave nothing back.

"He doesn't trust you," said Mei.

"Nobody in the water has ever been asked to trust me. They're told to obey." He looked down at his hands. "Come up," he called. "Please."

It sounded as if the word had been dragged out of him with a hook. Mei stared at him.

Out at the edge of the light, a head broke the surface.

It came in slowly, a round head with the hair plastered flat, swimming low in the water like a dog that expects to be kicked. It stopped a boat's length off. Liulang's face was the color of a peeled egg in the lamplight, and his eyes went from Mei to the prince and back to Mei, and stayed on her.

"You're late," said Mei, before she could stop herself. Her voice did something strange in the middle.

"Mei," said Liulang. "Mei, there's a dragon in your boat."

"I know."

"A royal dragon. One of the sons. I felt him come up through the water, I thought my teeth would come out." He didn't come any closer. "Do you know what he is?"

"He's a fish," said Mei. "He owes me seventy-five coppers. Come and have your wine."

It took half a cup to get him to the side of the boat, and another half to get him to hook his elbows over it, and he kept them there stiffly, ready to let go. The prince had gone back to the bow. He sat with his arms folded and watched Liulang with his gold eyes half closed, like a cat watching another cat cross its yard.

"He drives fish," said the prince. "Into your net. For wine."

"For bad wine," said Liulang. "Very bad. She buys it from a man who makes it in a bucket."

"They're my father's fish."

"They're the lake's fish. Your father doesn't eat them." Liulang looked at Mei. "Does he?"

"He won't eat fish at all," said Mei. "He knows them personally."

Liulang turned his head and looked at the prince for a long moment, and the prince looked back at him, and Mei, holding the jug, had the strong feeling that she was watching two men walk round each other in a market square deciding whether to fight.

"Huh," said Liulang finally. "I knew a fish once. Big old grass carp under the willows. I used to talk to him. I never drove him in."

"His name," said the prince, after a pause, "was Old Ji. He was ninety-one. He died the winter before last."

"He was a good fish."

"He was a terrible fish. He bit." The prince looked away. "But he was a good age."

There was a silence. Liulang held out the cup without looking at it, and Mei filled it.

"Here's how it is," Liulang said to the prince. "I beat the fish into her net. Not the old ones. Not the ones with names. The fat stupid ones that come in shoals under the willows in spring, that would eat their own mothers."

He drank, and held the cup out again, and Mei filled it.

"She sells them in the county town. That's her rice. That's the ferry's patches. That's the wine."

He drank. "You want her to stop, pay her rice."

"I am paying her," said the prince stiffly. "I'm poling."

Liulang choked on the wine. He came up coughing, and held on to the side of the boat, and looked at Mei with streaming eyes.

"He's poling?"

"Badly," said Mei.

"A son of the Dragon King is poling your ferry."

"He turned it over. He's working it off."

Liulang put his forehead down on his wet arms on the side of the boat, and his shoulders started to shake. For a moment Mei didn't know what it was. Then she heard it, a wet helpless wheeze coming up out of his chest, and it got louder, and then he was laughing, really laughing, the laugh she hadn't heard in four nights, hanging off her boat in the black water with his whole drowned body shaking.

"It's not funny," said the prince.

"It's," said Liulang, "the funniest thing that has happened in this lake since I drowned."

"I went round in circles twice," said the prince. "In front of the egg woman."

Liulang slid off the side of the boat and went under. He came up again a little way off, still laughing, and spat out a mouthful of lake.

Mei looked at the bow. The prince was sitting there with his arms folded and his chin up and a faint pink color along his cheekbones, and he was watching Liulang in the water as if the laugh were a language he meant to learn.

They drove the fish together in the end. She didn't see how it was settled. Liulang swam to the bow and said something to the prince in a low voice, and the prince said something back, and Liulang said, "Fine, but I'm keeping the wine," and the prince said, "You may keep the wine. It's undrinkable," and that seemed to be the treaty.

The prince couldn't go under. The lake still wouldn't have him. But he could stand in the bow and look down into it, and he could see, he said, every fish in the shallows as clearly as she could see the boards of her own deck. So he stood in the bow and pointed, and said, in his court voice, "Seven grass carp, fat, stupid, no names, under the second willow."

"Six," said Liulang, from the water. "One's got a name. The one with the torn fin. That's Auntie Tang's Lucky."

The prince looked again, for a long breath. "Six," he said stiffly.

And Liulang dived and drove them, and the net came up heavy, and nobody had to know anybody personally.

Liulang hung off the side of the boat afterward with the last of the wine, and the prince sat on the bow bench, and Mei sat in the stern between them with the basket at her feet and her hands smelling of fish, and the lamp burned steady on its pole, and nobody spoke for a while.

"How long are you bound?" said Liulang.

"Until I save her life."

"And when will that be?"

"When she's actually dying," said the prince. "The law is particular."

Liulang gazed up past the stern, past the lamp, at the old ferry post standing up black out of the shallows, with its white lines climbing it and the red line near the top.

"Then you'd better be quick about it," said Liulang, low.

The prince turned his head.

"Why?"

But Liulang had already pushed off. He drifted back from the boat into the edge of the light, and floated there on his back with his round face turned up to the stars, as he did on warm nights when he'd had more than his cup.

"What do I call you?" he said to the sky. "Not Your Highness. I'm dead, I don't have to."

The prince took his time. Mei watched him think about it.

"She calls me Fish," he said finally.

"I'm not calling you what she calls you," said Liulang. "That's hers." He rolled over in the water and began to swim away down the current, low and easy, and his voice came back to them out of the dark. "Good night, Mei. Good night, Bo."

The prince sat in the bow with his hands open on his knees.

Mei looked at him. "What," she said.

"Nobody calls me that." He was still looking at the place where Liulang had gone. "He said it as if it were a name."

"It is a name."

"I know," said the prince. "I'd forgotten."