Chapter 8: Borrowed

For three days nobody mentioned the post.

The new red line stood on the post, bright as a cut, and Mei didn't look at it and the prince didn't look at her not looking at it. She made him pole. He got better. By the twenty-third he could take a full load across in a straight line with the wind on the beam, and the egg woman had stopped coming down to the landing to watch, which he seemed to feel as a loss.

In the evenings Liulang came up for his cup and the three of them fished. The prince stood in the bow and said things like "Nine silver carp, no names, extremely stupid, under the reeds," and the basket filled. On the twenty-second Mei sold the catch in the county town, carrying the lit lamp up the road on a bamboo pole so he could come, and came back with forty coppers, a new wick and a bag of dried dates. She ate the dates in front of him, one at a time, because he'd said dates were peasant food, and he lasted until the eleventh one before he held out his hand.

On the night of the twenty-fourth, the boats left.

She was lying on the cabin roof, which she did on warm nights, with her hands behind her head and the stars thick as spilled rice, listening to the frogs. The prince was in the bow. The lamp was burning on its pole beside her. And out across the water, from nowhere at all, somebody began to play the pipes.

Mei sat up.

It was faint and high and sweet, a long wandering tune, like wind through a reed bed, and under it, soft, a drum. It came from the middle of the lake. There was nothing in the middle of the lake. There was mist, lying low on the black water in long pale bars, and the moon on the mist, and nothing else at all.

On the landing, a rope creaked.

She turned her head. The Zhangs' fishing boat was moored to the second iron ring, as it always was, and as she watched, the rope that held it lifted itself off the ring, slowly, as if a hand were lifting it, and slid into the water. The boat turned. It drifted out from the landing, without a sound, nose first, toward the music.

Then the Lis' boat. Then the egg woman's brother's skiff, and the duck boat, and the old leaking punt that nobody owned, one after another, every boat at Willow Crossing slipping its rope and turning and drifting out into the mist in a long slow line.

"Oh," said Mei. "Oh, they're borrowing."

The prince was on his feet in the bow.

"Who," he said, "is borrowing."

"The lake people. My grandfather told me. Once every few years, on a spring night, they borrow every boat on the lake to go and look at the moon."

The old punt drifted past, empty, turning slowly.

"You don't fight it," said Mei. "You lie down flat under a mat and you don't look. And in the morning your boat's back on its rope, and sometimes there's a silver ingot under the seat."

"Sometimes."

"Grandfather said a man at Two Pines got a whole string of pearls."

The ferry's mooring rope lifted off its ring.

Mei watched it go. It slid off the iron and dropped into the lake, and the ferry turned, gently, under her, and began to drift out after the others. The lamp swung on its pole. She felt the current take them, except it wasn't the current: the current at Willow Crossing ran east, and they were going north.

"Get down," said the prince.

He said it so sharply that she looked at him. He was standing in the bow with his face toward the music, and in the moonlight she could see that the scales had come up all along his throat and down both wrists, white and shining, and his fists were shut. For the first time since she'd met him he looked frightened, which on him looked like anger with the blood taken out.

"What's the matter with you?"

"That's the Spring Progress," said the prince. "That's my father."

He hid in the cabin.

He didn't fit in the cabin. Nobody would have fitted in the cabin; it had been built for one bedroll and one ferrywoman, and the prince was a hand taller than the door. He got in on his knees, and folded himself up behind the box of paper money with his knees against his chin, and Mei threw the passengers' blanket over him and then, because his feet were sticking out, the net.

"If anyone sees me," said the heap under the net, "if anyone at all sees me. A son of the king, bound to a ferry. Bound to a mortal. In a carter's trousers."

"Is it bad?"

"It's the worst thing that has happened to my family in four hundred years."

"What happened four hundred years ago?"

"My uncle married a cormorant," said the heap. "Don't give anyone your name. Don't eat anything. Don't drink anything. And whatever you do, don't haggle with my father."

"I haggle with everybody."

"Mei."

He had never called her by her name before. She stood in the cabin doorway looking down at the heap with the net over it, and the ferry drifted on into the mist, and the music grew louder.

"Fine," she said. "I won't haggle with your father."

She went and stood at the stern by the lamp, with her hand on the pole, and watched.

The mist opened.

It didn't thin. It opened, like a pair of curtains, and on the other side the lake was full of light. There were lanterns everywhere, hundreds of them, green and gold and the pale blue of a fish's belly, floating on the water by themselves, with no boats under them and no strings. In the middle of the lanterns lay a barge.

It was bigger than the governor's barge that came down to Anping at the autumn festival, bigger than the tea shed and Auntie Tang's house and the willows put together. Its prow was a dragon's head with its mouth open and pearls in its eyes, its sides were lacquered red and gold, and it had a roof like a temple's, with the corners curled up and bells hanging from them. The bells rang softly, though there was no wind.

All round it, in a wide circle, sat the borrowed boats of the lake. Mei saw the Zhangs' boat and the duck boat, boats from Two Pines and the south shore and places she didn't know, fifty or sixty of them, rocking gently on the lit water with nobody in them. Except that there was somebody in them. On every boat, standing very upright, there were people. Women in green, with their hair up in loops and long sleeves trailing. Men in armor that shone like the inside of a mussel shell. And on the duck boat, holding a halberd and looking deeply uncomfortable, something with the body of a man and the head of a large mandarin fish.

The ferry slid gently into its place in the circle, between the Zhangs' boat and the egg woman's brother's, and stopped.

A woman in green stepped onto it from the Zhangs' boat. She was young and pale, with a pointed chin, and she stepped across the gap without looking down, as if the water were a floor, and landed on Mei's boards with no sound at all. She took in Mei, the lamp and the cabin.

"Oh," she said. "There's a person on this one."

"It's my boat," said Mei.

"They're not supposed to have people on them." The woman in green looked worried. "Nobody stays on. Everybody always lies down under a mat."

"I've got a mat. I'm not under it." Mei folded her arms. "Who's paying for this?"

"Paying?"

"For the boat. You've borrowed my boat. That's a night's hire. In the season, a night's hire is twenty coppers. I'll take it in silver, I'm not proud."

The woman in green stared at her. Then, slowly, she began to smile.

"Nobody's ever asked that," she said.

"Somebody should have."

"I'll ask the steward," said the woman in green, and from the heap in the cabin there came a faint, despairing sound, like a bellows being slowly sat on, and the woman's head turned. Mei stepped sideways into the cabin doorway.

"Cat," she said. "He's old."

"He sounds big."

"He's old and big," said Mei, "and he's got a terrible temper, and he bites."

The woman in green looked at her for a moment longer, with her head on one side. Then she smiled again, and stepped back across the gap onto the Zhangs' boat, light as a leaf. "My name's Zhicheng," she said over her shoulder. "Don't tell anybody I talked to you."

It was beautiful, which struck her as unreasonable of them.

There was music from the barge, pipes and a zither and the soft drum, and lanterns floating up off the water into the air and hanging there among the stars, and the moon over the hills. It was the twenty-fourth. The moon should have been a paring that didn't rise before the cocks. This one hung over the hills as round as a rice cake, with the gray shadows on it. They had brought their own. Women in green came and went across the boats with trays, and the trays had cups on them, and fruit she couldn't put a price on, which annoyed her more than anything else that night. She didn't eat anything. She didn't drink anything. She stood at her lamp and kept her hand on the pole, and behind her in the cabin the prince breathed carefully under the net.

On the barge, high up under the temple roof, she could see a figure sitting alone. It was an old man in white and silver, with a long thin beard, and he was looking at the moon. Everybody else on the lake was looking at him.

She didn't look at him for long, because he had the stillness of someone who had never had to raise his voice to be obeyed. She knew that kind from the county town, and didn't like it.

Instead she studied the boat two places along from hers, on the far side of the egg woman's brother's skiff. It was a pleasure boat, a pretty one, painted blue, with a little roof of woven bamboo and lanterns hanging from the corners, the kind rich young men in the county town hired for a night on the water with friends and wine. It wasn't from Willow Crossing. And it had somebody in it who wasn't a lake person.

He was lying on his back across the cushions in the stern with one arm flung out and a wine jar in the crook of it, a young man in a scholar's blue gown with his hat over his face. He was snoring. She could hear it from three boats away, over the zither.

"Look at that," she said to the cabin. "Somebody else didn't get under a mat."

The heap rustled and subsided.

A woman in green came along the boats with a tray, stepping lightly from prow to prow. It was Zhicheng, the one with the pointed chin. She reached the pleasure boat, and stepped over the scholar's legs on her way across, and the hem of her green skirt lifted, and Mei saw her feet. They were small and narrow and she wore embroidered stockings, green silk with a little pattern of water weed climbing up the ankle.

The scholar stopped snoring.

He pushed his hat up off his face. He looked at the stocking, which was right beside his head. He looked at it with the slow, serious, deeply interested expression of a man who has had a great deal to drink and has just seen the most beautiful thing in the world.

Then he turned his head and bit it.

The woman in green screamed.

It went up over the lake like a heron going up out of the reeds. The zither stopped. The pipes stopped. The drum gave one more beat, and then it stopped too, and every lantern on the water seemed to hang a little heavier in the air, and every head in every boat turned.

The woman in green was standing on the edge of the pleasure boat with her tray in both hands and one foot lifted, and the scholar was lying on the cushions with his mouth open and a thread of green silk caught on his lower lip, and his face was going, slowly, from pink to white.

High up on the barge, the old man in white and silver turned his head away from the moon.

"Who is that," he said.

His voice wasn't loud. It came across the water as if he'd been standing next to her, and it was older than the lake, and under her feet, under the boards, she felt the whole lake go cold.

The fish-headed guard on the duck boat lifted his halberd.

"A mortal, Majesty," somebody called. "A drunk one. He's bitten the Lady Zhicheng's stocking."

The old man looked at the scholar as you'd look at a fly on a plate.

"Take his head," he said, and turned back to the moon.