Chapter 2

A Morning at Fifteen

The kitchen of Qin Manor was thick with smoke and steam from before the break of dawn, for fires were lit in three stoves at once, and each time the lids of the great iron cauldrons lifted and rattled, the smell of cooking rice climbed the rafters and spilled out into the yard. By that smell the servants knew the day had begun, and by the pitch of Auntie Zhang's voice they gauged the mood it would have.

"Is that the beanpole? Why is it that no matter how much I feed you, not a scrap of flesh will stick to you?"

With the hand that held her ladle, Auntie Zhang pushed Xiao Han by the back onto the low stool beside the hearth. The servants had no table of their own; it was the custom of this house that each should eat with a single bowl set upon his knees. Rice was heaped high in Xiao Han's bowl, and then, unseen by the others, Auntie Zhang's ladle passed over it once more. Two or so pieces of pork, half of them fat, slipped quietly onto the rice.

It had been so in his former life as well. For eight years this woman had laid one extra piece of meat in Xiao Han's bowl alone, and never once had she spoken of it aloud. In the winter of the year of the fire she had gone back down to her home village, and after that there was no one who put meat in Xiao Han's bowl.

"Thank you, Auntie."

"Thank me for what? Anyone who heard you would think I look after only you. Hurry up and eat."

Beside him, Xiao Han's fellow servant of the same age, Xiao Fu, hugged his bowl and shoved his backside in close. His cheeks were plump and his eyes narrow, so that his face seemed to smile even when he was not smiling, but the moment he saw the meat on Xiao Han's rice, those narrow eyes grew as wide as they could go.

"Han'er, are you going to eat all of that?"

"I am going to eat all of it."

"Just one piece."

"I will not."

"You gave me some yesterday."

Xiao Han's chopsticks stopped. Yesterday, that would be the yesterday of fifteen years of age, and the fifteen-year-old Xiao Han had most likely given this fellow some meat. To him now, having lived forty-five years, it was a thing so dimly distant that it could not possibly have remained in his memory. Xiao Han looked into Xiao Fu's face for a moment, then picked up a piece of meat and moved it into the boy's bowl.

"...If I gave it yesterday, then I suppose I must give it today as well."

"Why do you talk like that these days? You sound just like my father."

Xiao Fu said it through a mouthful, chewing as he shoved the meat in. Xiao Han did not reply but ate his rice. The rice that touched his fifteen-year-old tongue was astonishingly sweet, and before that sweetness, for a while, he could think of nothing at all.

When breakfast had been cleared, Xiao Han took up a broom and went out into the inner courtyard. The inner courtyard was the front garden of the inner hall where the master's family dwelt, and so its sweeping was entrusted only to the most deft-handed among the servants. Xiao Han, who had entered this house at ten, had been given that task in the year he turned fourteen, and for thirty-one years thereafter that broom had not left his hand for a single day.

Here and there across the spring courtyard lay scattered plum petals that the night's wind had brought down. Xiao Han swept. Each time the tip of the broom passed over the earth it left an even grain, and that grain ran from the end of the eaves toward the main gate in orderly lines like ripples. That one must loosen the wrist and sweep from the shoulder if the grain was not to scatter was something he had learned from Old Wang, yet the fifteen-year-old wrist had apparently not yet mastered the knack in full, for now and then a stroke went astray. Each time, Xiao Han went back to the place, bent his wrist again, and swept it over.

"Han'er."

A gentle voice came from behind him. Xiao Han's broom stopped in midair.

He turned, and on the veranda of the inner hall stood a woman. Over a jacket of pale indigo she had draped a thin outer robe, and her hair was neatly coiled up and fastened with a single hairpin. Her complexion was somewhat pale, owing to a constitution frail from birth, but her eyes were clear and bright, and no matter of the household, great or small, ever slipped past them.

Xiao Han stood the broom upright and bowed at the waist. Straightening his bent back took one breath longer than usual.

The last sight he had had of the Madam in his former life was beyond a wall of flames. On the night the roof of the inner hall came crashing down, Xiao Han had stood in the middle of the yard holding a water jar and done nothing but stare at that roof. That had been as much as an eighteen-year-old servant could do.

"Madam, you have risen early."

"The sound of your sweeping woke me. The grain was so unusually fine today that I wondered who it could be."

Madam Liu sat down at the edge of the veranda and smiled.

"It seems you have been sleeping poorly these nights. It is dark beneath your eyes."

"Forgive me."

"It is not a thing to be forgiven but a thing to be worried over. I shall tell Steward Wang to let you go in early and rest today."

"There is no need, Madam. I am well."

Instead of answering, the Madam looked at Xiao Han for a long while. They were eyes that wished to ask something, yet the Madam only brushed the dust from the veranda once with the end of her sleeve and in the end did not ask.

Just then there came a clatter from deep within the inner hall, and the sliding lattice door was flung roughly open.

"Mother! Has Father already gone out? He said he would take me with him today!"

Qin Shuran came running barefoot out onto the veranda. Her hair was only half braided, the ties of her jacket were knotted on entirely the wrong side, and in her hand, gripped like a sword, was a branch broken off from who knew where. Madam Liu pressed a hand to her brow.

"Shuran, what have you done with your socks?"

"I can put my socks on later! Where is Father?"

"He has gone up the hill behind the manor. I do not think he ever said he would take you."

"He did, last night. I begged him and he said 'I will think about it,' and that means he will."

Shuran pouted, and only then noticed Xiao Han standing in the courtyard. Her eyes moved from his face to the broom, and from the broom back to his face.

"Ugly Han'er, you know where Father is, don't you?"

Ugly Han'er. Xiao Han began to count how long it had been since he last heard that name, then gave it up. This young lady had called him so from the age of thirteen to sixteen, and after the fire she had stopped calling him anything at all.

"He is at the rocky clearing past the pine grove on the hill behind the manor, Miss."

"Do you know the way there?"

"I do, but you must not go."

"Why not?"

"When the master trains, he admits no one."

"I'm not no one. I'm his daughter."

Shuran swung her branch and made to come down off the veranda, but was caught by her mother's gaze and sat back down. Madam Liu retied her daughter's jacket ties properly and spoke softly.

"Your father must have his reasons for not teaching you the sword."

"What reasons? Because I'm a girl?"

"Who can say. You had better ask your father that."

The Madam smiled, but Xiao Han knew the reason. In his former life he had come to know it only after Qin Tianming had passed the age of fifty. It was a tale his master, who had no head for wine, had let slip when a single cup made him drunk: that he had once lost, by the sword, someone to whom he had taught the sword, and so he would never again put a sword into anyone's hand. Who that person had been, he never did say.

Shuran suddenly glared at Xiao Han. The tips of her slender brows were raised as high as they would go.

"You, you just laughed."

"I did not laugh."

"You did. The corners of your mouth went up."

"I was only recalling that the young lady had tied her ties on the wrong side."

"Why, you!"

The branch came flying. Xiao Han tilted his head by half an inch, and the branch grazed past his ear, struck the wall behind him, and fell. Shuran's eyes went round. Madam Liu's brows rose, ever so slightly.

Only then did Xiao Han realize what he had done. A fifteen-year-old servant would have taken a flying branch on the forehead and made a sorry face; tilting his head half an inch to let it slip past was the work of eyes that had watched the foremost sword under heaven train for close to thirty years.

He hastily bent, picked up the fallen branch, and offered it to Shuran with both hands, in exactly the posture of a servant presenting an object to the young lady of the house he served.

"...Forgive me. My body flinched of its own accord."

"That wasn't a flinch. You dodged it."

"It is only that this lowly one is a coward."

Shuran took the branch with a dubious face. Fortunately, the attention of a thirteen-year-old young lady never lingered long in one place, and when the sound of a puppy barking came from the back yard, Shuran turned her head that way and ran off again, still without her socks. Madam Liu sighed and followed her with her eyes.

"Han'er."

"Yes, Madam."

"Do truly rest early today."

Leaving only those words, the Madam went inside. Only after watching the lattice door close did Xiao Han straighten his bent back.

When the sun had passed its height, Xiao Han was crouched beside the row of crocks behind the servants' quarters. In his hand was a stub of charcoal, and on the flat stone at his feet were a few lines he had just drawn.

The lines were a reckoning of days. Today's date as Old Wang had spoken it; Auntie Zhang's word that the eleventh of next month was the day for making soy paste; the servants' talk that the master would visit his wife's family in Suzhou early next month. Fitting these one by one against the memories of his former life, it was beyond doubt the early spring of the year Xiao Han turned fifteen.

The fire had come in the spring of the year he turned eighteen, around the time of Qingming. Counting on his fingers, it was three years and a month or so more.

Xiao Han drew three lines on the stone with the charcoal. One was to prevent the fire. One was to protect the Madam, and the last was to learn who the masked man had been who came over the wall that night. But when he had finished drawing the lines and looked at them, not one of the three was a thing that could be done with a broom.

He needed a sword. Xiao Han rubbed out the lines on the flat stone with his palm. The charcoal dust came off black upon his hand. He looked down at that hand. It was a small and delicate fifteen-year-old hand. All that remained in this hand was the way to sweep, the way to wring a rag, and the sword formula of the twelve forms of the Heavenflow Sword Art, which he had for close to thirty years only heard with his ears. Never once had he tried to carry into his body what his ears had heard.

Until the sun sank westward, the servants cleared away the evening meal, and the lamps of the inner hall went out one by one, Xiao Han carried out every task of the day without omitting a single one. When he heard from Old Wang that Madam Liu had said he should rest early, he even offered a punctilious word of thanks.

And when Qin Manor had fallen into deep sleep, he opened the door of the servants' quarters without a sound and went out. The path up the hill behind the manor showed faintly beneath the moonlight. In his former life, from the year he turned sixteen until he was forty-five, it was the path he had climbed every dawn, broom in hand, following behind his master. When he passed through the pine grove and reached the edge of the rocky clearing, the broad flat rock where his master used to stand, and below it the corner where Xiao Han had always stood with his broom, lay steeped in moonlight and silent.

Xiao Han stood in that corner. And then he took one step forward, toward the rock.

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