Chapter 4

A Servant's Ears

Whatever happened at Qin Manor, the place its news reached first was Auntie Zhang's hearth. The tales the coachman picked up at the market, the tales the seamstress overheard in the inner chambers, the tales the gatekeeper gleaned from passersby, all gathered before that hearth by evening and mingled together like broth in a single pot.

In his former life, Xiao Han had learned this late. Only after a word let slip over wine by the coachman of a visiting martial artist, or a scrap of complaint muttered by another household's maid at the well, had proved several times over to be the opening of an incident that shook the martial world ten days later, did he realize that the great affairs of the martial world reached the ears of servants before they reached his master's; by then he had served his master for twenty years. Over the fifteen years that followed, Xiao Han wove threads with the servants throughout Jiangnan, and those threads saved his master's life more than once after he became the foremost sword under heaven.

Now there was not a single one of those threads. The fifteen-year-old Xiao Han was nothing more than the beanpole to whom Auntie Zhang ladled extra rice.

On the morning of his fifth day of standing in horse stance, Xiao Han saw Auntie Zhang crouched before the crocks. She was opening the lids one by one, peering inside and clicking her tongue, and her face looked less like that of someone tasting soy paste than of someone who had lost something.

"Auntie, what are you looking for?"

"Oh, it's the beanpole. Looking for what? It's nothing."

The woman who claimed to be looking for nothing was opening her tenth crock lid. Xiao Han watched her for a moment, and a memory came back to him. In his former life, around this time, Auntie Zhang had gone about the kitchen for three days with a face as though her soul had left her. She had lost the silver hairpin her late husband had given her at their wedding. The hairpin had turned up that autumn, when the kimchi crocks were emptied, in a crack between the supporting stones at the very bottom of the last soy sauce crock. It had slipped from her hair while she was moving the crocks, and no one had known. For that half year she believed it had been stolen, and in the end she sent away a young maid who had newly come to the house.

Xiao Han remembered that maid's name, too. Where she had gone after being driven out, he did not know.

"Could it be a hairpin you are looking for?"

Auntie Zhang's hand stopped upon the crock lid.

"...How would you know that?"

"I guessed it because you have been tying your hair with only a cord these past few days. I helped when the soy sauce crocks were moved last month, and I remembered that you were bending your head low a great deal then."

Xiao Han went to the last soy sauce crock and knelt before it. Between the two flat stones that supported the crock was a gap barely wide enough to admit one finger. When he put his finger into the gap and felt about, something cold and slender caught on his fingertip. He drew it out, and it was a silver hairpin, steeped in dirt and soy stains until it had gone blackish.

For a long while Auntie Zhang said nothing at all. The hand that took the hairpin trembled faintly, and she rubbed it clean with the hem of her apron again and again. When at length she raised her head, the rims of her eyes were red, but the words that came out of her mouth were as gruff as ever.

"...For a beanpole, you have sharp eyes. Two pieces of meat this evening."

"One piece is enough."

"If I say two pieces, it is two pieces. Where did you learn to talk back?"

Xiao Han bowed and withdrew. Auntie Zhang was a person who without fail repaid a kindness, and the manner of her repaying was, more often than not, to quietly pick out whatever was useful from the rumors gathered before her hearth and slip it into one's ear. In his former life it had taken ten years to win that ear.

The coachman Lao San's mouth opened to a different key from Auntie Zhang's. He could go a whole day without a word, brushing down the horses' backs, yet once wine went into him the market news came pouring out; and it had to be yellow wine brought up from Shaoxing, and Xiao Han's month's wages were barely enough to buy half a bottle of it.

A fifteen-year-old servant's wages were no bigger than a mouse's tail, and of those, half Old Wang set aside separately, calling it his marriage fund. In his former life Xiao Han had not drawn out a single coin of that money until past forty, because the occasion to marry had never come. If Old Wang learned that the reason he was touching that money for the first time in this life was to buy wine for the coachman, he would surely take up his cane. So Xiao Han resolved to give something else in place of wine.

Behind the stables, where Lao San was greasing a cartwheel, Xiao Han, passing by with a water jar on his shoulder, stopped. Qin Manor had two carts, and the larger of them was the cart that early next month would carry the master and his wife to her family's home in Suzhou. In his former life, that cart's left axle had snapped on the road to Suzhou, near Jiaxing. No one had been hurt, but the master and his wife had had to wait half a day by the roadside in the rain, and Lao San, on his return, had been caned on the calves by Old Wang. After that Lao San had given up drink for half a year, then taken it up again.

"Elder Lao San, about the left axle of that big cart."

Lao San, still holding the grease brush, turned only his head. The eyes that stared at him without a word were asking why a servant brat was poking his nose into another man's business.

"The last time the cart came into the yard, there was a creak from the left wheel. It was different from the other sounds. It was the sound dry wood makes when it splits."

It was a lie. He had never heard any such sound. He only knew that the axle would break in half a month or so.

Lao San did not reply. Instead he put down the grease brush and crawled beneath the large cart. For a long while there came the sound of something being tapped underneath, and when at length Lao San crawled out, the color of his face had changed. On his palm lay a sliver of wood the size of a finger joint that had come away from the axle. On its inner side ran a deep crack.

"...If we had gone to Suzhou like this..."

Lao San did not finish the sentence. Nor did Xiao Han finish it for him.

That evening, Lao San came wordlessly to the front of the servants' quarters and held out a bag of roasted peanuts to Xiao Han. And as he turned away he tossed off a single remark.

"If you ever have business at the market, say so. I will give you a ride."

Xiao Han took the bag of peanuts and did not straighten his back until Lao San had turned the corner of the stable.

Over the ten days that followed, Xiao Han did the same thing several more times. He told the seamstress where the silver thimble that had vanished from her sewing basket had rolled off to; he hinted to the old gatekeeper that the reason he wrenched his back every year about this time was that the bar of the main gate was set too low; and he discovered before Auntie Zhang did that Xiao Fu had laid hands on the honey jar behind her back, and put the jar back in its proper place.

All of them were trifling things that had happened in this house in his former life. Any servant who had lived thirty-five years in one house would have a bundle of such things stored away in his head, but the only one who could open that bundle with a fifteen-year-old body was Xiao Han.

Of course, he received his due. The seamstress mended his worn clothes for nothing, the gatekeeper began pretending not to see Xiao Han going in and out of the servants' quarters at night, and from then on Xiao Fu ran any errand Xiao Han set him without a word of complaint. That was the price of not telling Auntie about the honey jar.

"Han'er, you really are strange these days. How do you know everything?"

"If you have eyes, you see it."

"I have eyes too."

"You look only at things to eat, do you not?"

Xiao Fu thought for a moment, then nodded meekly. It seemed he had no rebuttal.

It was around the last day of that month that Auntie Zhang slipped the first rumor into Xiao Han's ear.

In the kitchen, after the evening washing-up was done and the servants had scattered one by one, Auntie banked the embers left in the stove with ash and began to speak as if talking to herself.

"I hear a guest is coming around the middle of next month. The Madam's younger cousin on her family's side."

"You mean Hero Liu?"

"Yes, that gentleman who they say holds a high post in the Martial Alliance. When he comes, I cannot leave the kitchen for three days. It is not that he is fussy about food, but he calls every servant by name, one by one, so how could I set a careless table? When he came last year he told me, 'Auntie Zhang's Dongpo pork is better than the main house's in Suzhou.'"

There was a quiet pride in Auntie's voice. Xiao Han nodded. The man called Liu Qingsong had been so in his former life as well. Each time he came to Qin Manor he handed out small gifts to the servants, praised the cook's food, and asked the names of even the coachman's horses.

"And one more thing."

Auntie lowered her voice and glanced toward the kitchen door; when the sound of Xiao Fu unloading firewood came from outside, she held her tongue and waited until it had moved off.

"Lao San says that lately those Black Wind Gang louts outside Hangzhou's north gate have been running wild. That fellow Niu Kui, their gang master, has taken on a new deputy, and it is said he is one who uses poison. Two herbalists at the market have already shut their doors. Whatever herbs he is buying up in such quantities, if a poison-maker has made the herbalists close shop, that is the end of that."

Xiao Han's hand stopped before the stove.

The Black Wind Gang. In his former life, after the fire of Hangzhou had been put out, the culprit the magistrate's office named had been that very Black Wind Gang. Three arsonists had been caught and beheaded, and the master, not content to end it there, had torn the Black Wind Gang out by the roots. That had been the first step that made his master a man soaked in blood. And yet the Black Wind Gang was already moving a full three years before the fire.

The name of this poison-using deputy, he had never heard in his former life. Nor was there any such man among the three the magistrate's office had beheaded.

"Beanpole, what are you thinking so hard about again?"

"Nothing. It only seemed the embers were still alive."

Xiao Han pressed down the ash once more with the poker. The embers were already dead.

That night too, Xiao Han stood in horse stance in the corner of the clearing. The legs that half a month ago could not hold out for ten breaths were now passing a hundred. When his thighs began to shake, he would lay out one by one the rumors he had heard that day: the Black Wind Gang's new deputy, the two herbalists who had shut their doors, and the guest who would come in half a month. There was nothing better for forgetting the trembling.

When the guest came, the kitchen and the servants' quarters would be in an uproar for three days, so slipping out at night would, if anything, be all the easier. What weighed on his mind more was what herbs the poison-user was buying up. Poison was of no use for setting a fire, so whatever use the man had in mind lay somewhere other than fire.

Xiao Han held out until just before his legs gave way, then sat down with his back against the rock. As his sweat cooled, his body shivered.

When his breathing had evened out, he rose again and bent his knees.

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