Chapter 9: The Lake Court

Two guards in mussel-shell armor came across the boats for the scholar, stepping from prow to prow without a sound, and lifted him off his cushions by the arms. He came up with the wine jar still in the crook of his elbow. He looked at it and then at the guards, and seemed to be working hard to decide which of them was the problem.

"I think," he said, "there's been a misunderstanding."

They carried him away across the boats toward the barge, his feet trailing, his hat falling off into the lake. Nobody on the borrowed boats moved. The women in green stood with their trays and their long sleeves and looked at the water. The music didn't start again. On the barge, under the curled temple roof, the old man in white and silver went on looking at the moon.

Mei stood at her lamp with her hand on the pole.

"Don't," said the heap in the cabin.

"I didn't say anything."

"I can hear you not saying anything. Don't."

Across the boats, the guards had got the scholar up a little gangway onto the front deck, under the carved dragon's head, and put him on his knees on the boards. A huge figure in a dark robe came out from under the roof to stand over him, a man with a great wide flat face and long whiskers drooping from either side of his mouth, all the way to his chest, like a catfish. He was carrying a sword. He was taking a long time to draw it, in the manner of a man who enjoys his work.

The scholar was crying now, though not loudly. He knelt there in his blue gown with his head down and his shoulders shaking, and Mei could hear him from where she stood, a small, hiccuping, drunk, frightened sound, and every face on every borrowed boat was turned politely away.

She had seen those faces before.

"Mei," said the heap. "Mei. It's not your business. It's my father's court and my father's law and he's a stranger, and if you go over there and open your mouth..."

"I know."

"Then don't."

"I promised I wouldn't haggle with your father," said Mei. She took her hand off the pole. "I didn't say anything about his fish."

It was nine boats to the barge. She had never walked across boats that weren't tied together before, and it turned out to be just like walking across boats that were, only wetter. The Zhangs' boat dipped under her. The duck boat dipped and stank. The mandarin-fish guard on the duck boat turned his enormous head and stared at her with one round flat eye, and she said, "Evening," and stepped past him onto the next prow, and he was so surprised he forgot to lift his halberd.

Behind her she heard the ferry rock as something big and furious threw off a net, and then stop, because the prince had remembered, just in time, that he could not be seen.

The barge was higher than the boats. She climbed up its side by the carved dragon's neck, which made good handholds, and hauled herself over the rail onto the front deck, and stood up in front of the catfish man with his sword half out of its scabbard.

Everybody looked at her.

It was the most people who had ever looked at her at once, and they were not people. The women in green, and the shell-armored guards, and the courtiers under the temple roof in their robes of a hundred watery colors, eel-brown and carp-gold and the gray-green of deep water, all of them turned and looked at her with the same faint, wondering, slightly disgusted expression, as if a heron had walked into a banquet.

"Excuse me," said Mei. "Who's in charge of the boats?"

The catfish man looked down at her. He was at least two heads taller than she was, and his whiskers moved by themselves.

"I am the Steward of the Progress," he said. His voice was deep and wet. "Who are you?"

"I'm the ferry." She pointed back across the boats, at her lamp burning on its pole. "That one. You borrowed it. Nobody asked me."

"Nobody is ever asked."

"Well, that's a bad way to run a ferry service." She looked down at the scholar, who had stopped crying and was staring up at her with his mouth open and his face wet. He was younger than she'd thought. Twenty, maybe. He had a soft chin and ink on his fingers and a thread of green silk still caught on his lip. "And this one's on a boat I know. That's Old Hu's pleasure boat from the county town. He hires it out by the night."

The Steward's whiskers twitched.

"If you take this boy's head on it," said Mei, "there'll be blood all over Old Hu's cushions. He'll charge the boy's family, who won't pay. And then Old Hu will come and complain to me, because everybody complains to the ferry."

The Steward of the Progress studied her.

"What," he said at last, "do you want?"

"I want to know what his head's worth."

There was a sound from under the temple roof. It was small. It might have been a cough.

"His head," said the Steward, "is forfeit. He laid his mouth on the person of a lady of the court."

"He bit her sock," said Mei. "He's drunk. He didn't know what he was biting. He'd have bitten the boat if the boat had been nearer." She turned round to look for the woman in green. Zhicheng was standing on the edge of the barge, at the rail, with her tray held against her chest and one stocking foot drawn up under her skirt, and her face pink to the ears. "Did he hurt you?"

Zhicheng glanced at the scholar. The scholar met her eyes with the thread of her stocking still on his lip, and went red too.

"No," said Zhicheng, low. "He has..." She stopped.

"He has what?"

"Quite nice teeth," said Zhicheng, and looked at the deck.

Somebody among the courtiers laughed, and stopped at once.

"There," said Mei. "She's not hurt. He's sorry. He'll pay for the stocking. Silk, embroidered, one only, slightly bitten. Fifty coppers. Call it sixty for the trouble."

The courtiers studied their sleeves.

"A head's got to be worth more than a sock," said Mei. "So if you take the head, you're overcharging." She folded her arms. "I'd take you to the magistrate for that."

The Steward's sword had stopped halfway out of its scabbard. He looked at it, as if he wasn't sure how it had got there.

"You," he said slowly, "are haggling for a man's head."

"Somebody has to. Nobody else is."

"Enough."

It was the old man's voice. It came out from under the temple roof, and it wasn't loud, but every whisker on the Steward's face went flat, and every guard on the deck went down on one knee, and the courtiers bowed so low that their sleeves lay on the boards, all at once, with a sound like wind going over reeds.

Mei didn't kneel. She didn't think of it until it was too late, and then it seemed rude to start.

The old man in white and silver was looking at her.

He was old. Up close she could see it. His face was long and lined and the color of old ivory, and his beard was white, and so thin she could see the silver embroidery on his robe through it. His eyes were gold. They were exactly the color of the prince's eyes, and they were so tired that she wanted, absurdly, to offer him a stool.

"A mortal," he said, "on my Progress. Who will not lie under a mat."

"It's my boat," said Mei.

"So I heard. Twenty coppers a night, in silver." The gold eyes moved over her, slowly, from her bare feet to her headscarf. "You haggled with my maid."

"She's a nice girl. She didn't know the rate."

"And now you haggle with my steward. For the head of a drunk who doesn't know you."

"He's on a boat I know."

The old man let the pause run so long that the bells on the corners of the roof stopped ringing. Mei felt the lake under the barge, all of it, deep and cold and still, and she found the loose end of the barge's bow rope by the rail and wound it round her fist, turn by turn, so as to have something to do. She had a bad feeling she'd just done something stupid. She went on winding anyway.

"The men of letters," said the old man at last, "used to amuse me. When I was younger. They wrote odes." He looked down at the scholar. "Are you a man of letters?"

The scholar opened his mouth and nothing came out. Mei kicked him, gently, in the ankle.

"Yes," he croaked. "Majesty. I passed the county examination. Twice. I mean I took it twice. I passed it once."

The Dragon King turned toward the moon. "Then write me an ode. On the moon on the water. If it pleases me, you keep your head. You have until it touches the hills."

"That's not fair," said Mei.

The whole court, which had just begun to breathe again, stopped.

"He's drunk," said Mei. "Nobody can write anything drunk, except bad letters to women. He'll need a brush and ink and paper. Good paper. And a cup of tea, strong."

The Steward opened his mouth.

"And someone to throw water on him first," said Mei. "You've got a whole lake." She looked at the moon, which was large and white and a long way above the hills still, but sinking. "And it should be until it goes behind them, not until it touches them. Touching's only a moment. Going behind takes longer."

The Dragon King didn't turn round.

"You will make a poor ghost one day," he said to the moon. "You'll argue with the Judges." His long face creased once, near the mouth. "Behind the hills. Give him the brush."

The Steward put away his sword.

They threw a bucket of lake over the scholar. They gave him a writing table, a low black lacquered one inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and a brush, and an inkstone, and paper so white it seemed to give off its own light. Zhicheng brought him tea. Her hands shook. He glanced up at her when she set it down, and she held the glance a moment too long, and Mei, standing by the rail, thought that if he got out of this alive she would charge somebody for the matchmaking.

The scholar ground his ink. He dipped his brush. He eyed the moon, then the paper.

He began to write.

He wrote two lines and crossed out one. He wrote another line. Mei couldn't read it, but she could see his face, and his face was a man drowning. He chewed the end of the brush. He wrote a fourth line, and looked at it, and read it aloud under his breath, to try it, the way people read prices back to themselves to see if they sound right:

"The silver moon lies on the water bright, like a... like a silver..." He stopped. "Like a silver plate," he whispered, "upon the... upon the night..."

A courtier winced.

The scholar's hand was shaking so much that ink dripped off the brush onto the white paper. The moon was a hand's width above the hills.

"Like a silver plate," he said again, desperately, "upon the night, and the... the fish..."

From nine boats away, across the still lit water, out of a cabin built for one ferrywoman, a voice spoke.

"Not a plate," it said.

It was clear and cold and furious and it carried across the lake like a struck bell, in the purest court speech, the kind that came through the walls of the county yamen on festival days. "You've used silver twice. The moon isn't a plate. It's the thing the water remembers."

The scholar's brush stopped in the air.

"The water keeps the moon as the lake keeps the drowned, and gives back neither," said the voice. "Then turn it. And for the love of all the rivers, do not rhyme night with bright in front of my father."

There was a silence on the lake so total that Mei heard a single drop of ink fall off the scholar's brush and hit the paper.

Every head on the barge had turned toward her ferry.

Under the temple roof, the Dragon King was no longer looking at the moon.

Zhicheng had set down her tray. She was already moving. She went down the barge's side and across the boats as lightly as she'd come, prow to prow, nine boats, and stepped onto Mei's ferry by the lamp, and bent to the cabin door. Mei saw her stop, and the green sleeves hang, and heard her say, softly but not so softly that it didn't carry, "Eighth Highness?" Nine boats of borrowed people held their breath on the lit water, and under the lanterns the ode lay unfinished on its page, with a single drop of ink drying at the end of the last line.