Chapter 202 Bad translation (Patreon)

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The door opens before I have finished opening my eyes, and, with my eyes still sleepy, I look up to see Xia come in, carrying a plate of steamed buns in her hands and wearing the face of someone who has been awake since well before the sun.

“Happy birthday!” she tells me.

I prop myself up on my elbows to look at her a little more comfortably.

“Thank you”, I tell her. “Since what time have you been in the kitchen?”

“Since early”, she replies.

Which, coming from Xia, means nothing good.

Behind her comes Lianhua, with my clothes folded over one arm. She leaves them at the foot of the bed and bows.

“Happy birthday, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

She says it in her usual voice, flat and polite, but she takes half a heartbeat longer than normal to straighten up.

Then she begins to dress me while Xia puts a bun in my hand so it doesn’t get cold.

Fourteen years old, and it is the first birthday of this life with no guests, if we leave aside the one that fell right in the middle of an imperial funeral.

At the Palace, a birthday was a political summit with paper lanterns, tables of Tiàoyuè and Fǎnzhuǎn, pizzas and hamburgers, and a guest list that worked exactly like a thermometer, because the number of people who came told you how much favor my mother still had at court.

My brothers never came, although I never stopped inviting them, so two people and a plate of buns seem like considerably better company to me.

Lianhua transfers me to the chair, positions my legs and smooths my skirt over my knees.

“And what do you want to do today?” Xia asks me.

I open my mouth to answer her and nothing comes out, because the answer I have is the same as every other day, which is the desk in my study, Master Mu’s pile of books and making talismans until the ink runs out.

So I go over the days I have spent in this city, and where I have spent them.

The inn, the Tower of the Five Dragons, the Pavilion of a Thousand Strokes. And the rest of the time, in this house.

At the Palace I lived the same way. I once thought it was like living in the Vatican and knowing only the Sistine Chapel and the nearest bathroom, but back then I had the excuse that they wouldn’t let me out.

Here I don’t have that excuse, because the only person who can forbid me from leaving this house is me.

And I didn’t sneak out of the Empire to go from being shut up in one room to being shut up in another, one that, on top of everything, I have to pay rent for.

“Today we are going to see the city”, I tell her. “The three of us.”

Xia goes still for a moment, and then her face lights up.

“To see the city?” she asks me. “What for?”

“For nothing in particular”, I reply. “Just to see it.”

And from the way she looks at me after those words, I suppose it is the strangest thing she has heard me say in years.

Lianhua doesn’t ask anything. She simply looks out the window, checks the sky and nods just once.

“I will prepare the boat, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

“And where are we going first?” Xia asks me.

That I don’t have to think about.

“To the Hundred Furnaces Quarter”, I tell her.

Because in this life I have seen a Feng the size of a house, but I still haven’t seen a single alchemist at work. I make my ink myself, in the cauldron on the other side of the courtyard, and that has about as much to do with alchemy as making soup has to do with the deconstruction of whatever it is Michelin-guide chefs deconstruct.

Although, with all the preparations, we don’t leave the island’s dock until well into the morning.

I ride secured in the spot I have finally had them build into our boat, although, just in case, Xia’s hand grips the armrest.

At the city dock they take me up the ramp, and as they take me up, the looks begin, which is how it always starts whenever I decide to go into the city.

You reach the Hundred Furnaces Quarter by nose sooner than by knowing the way, because I smell it two streets before I see it: a bitter, hot smell of boiled roots and of something mineral that sticks to the back of my throat.

Hou Deming didn’t exaggerate at all. The streets are wide and the ground is so flat that, for the first time since I arrived in this city, the chair rolls with hardly any rattling. The houses are low, almost all of them have their doors open, and above the rooftops hangs a layer of gray smoke that doesn’t move.

There are herbalists with roots hanging from the ceiling in bunches, drying sheds with herbs spread out in the sun and apprentices everywhere, going in and out of the houses with sacks and baskets without looking at anyone, although I notice that some of them are wearing a backpack.

And on the third street the real alchemists begin to appear.

Although, to my disappointment, there is no white-bearded elder stirring a cauldron amid colored clouds, just workshops.

Most of them are shop-style, and all of those are closed, but here and there you can see a few with a more open structure, each with its alchemy furnace, and in front of each furnace, someone sitting on a low stool, red-faced, watching the fire like someone making sure the bread doesn’t burn.

In my other life, a neighborhood like this would have been called an industrial park, and since my curiosity gets the better of me, I ask Lianhua to stop in front of one of the open-style workshops.

Inside, a woman with the emblem of the Jade Dew embroidered on her chest has both hands stretched toward the mouth of the furnace, without quite touching it, and the fire rises and falls to the rhythm of her fingers.

I activate Sensing the Qi for just an instant, and inside that furnace the fire Qi moves to the rhythm of those fingers just like the water in a bucket when someone stirs it.

In some of the workshops we pass there are counters at the door, with jars of pills and tablets with the prices, and Xia stops in front of every one of them and lets out a soft little whistle each time.

We don’t buy anything.

Between the Qi-gathering formation I carved into the floor at home and the spirit food Xia makes for us, which isn’t much, because without the Earth Gate my body can’t take more, we have more than enough to cultivate with. And as for pills, I know they leave impurities behind, and that this is why, in the end, they stop working.

So I look, which is free, but Xia isn’t content with looking.

In front of the fourth or fifth counter, with a jar of golden pills a handspan from her nose, she turns toward me, and it doesn’t occur to her to lower her voice.

“Well, when I’m a spirit chef, we won’t need any of this”, she tells me. “We’re going to have all the good parts of pills and none of the bad.”

I don’t correct her, although I know it isn’t entirely true, because she herself was the one who told me that those dishes give considerably less Qi than pills.

But that isn’t the problem. The problem is that she has said it in the middle of the Jade Dew’s quarter and four paces from three Jade Dew disciples who were talking beside the doorway next door.

I notice they have stopped talking, which reminds me of Lin Quingyu, sitting behind her desk and telling us that when we spoke with disciples of the Jade Dew we should be polite, not argue about alchemy and never correct them in public.

And Xia, in a single sentence, has just corrected in public an entire neighborhood full of them.

Two of the disciples merely glare at us. The third, the youngest and the one with the cleanest robe, pushes off from the wall and plants himself in front of Xia, so close that, from my chair, what I see most of him is the emblem on his chest.

“Spirit chef?” he asks her.

“That’s what I said”, Xia replies.

“A dish doesn’t give anywhere near what a pill gives”, he tells her. “Spirit chefs are cooks with airs who have decided to call a stew alchemy.”

“But it doesn’t leave impurities”, Xia replies.

“Impurities are the problem of those who don’t know how to take them”, he tells her.

“Then it’s a problem for almost everyone”, Xia replies.

And that is when the disciple raises his voice.

He starts explaining to a little girl, with his hands and in tremendous detail, why alchemy is better than spirit cooking, and Xia answers him point by point with what she heard in the inn’s kitchens, without retreating a single step.

I open my mouth to stop them, but Lianhua has already moved half a step, just enough to end up beside Xia with her hands folded in front of her.

“Excuse me”, she tells the disciple.

He falls silent and looks at her, more out of surprise than courtesy.

“You are arguing with a twelve-year-old girl”, Lianhua tells him.

She says nothing more, although she said that in her usual flat, polite voice.

The disciple opens his mouth to reply, but nothing comes out, and then he does what he hasn’t done all this time, which is look around, because a small crowd has gathered around us.

Apprentices stopped with various goods in their hands, an herbalist in her doorway and his two companions, who are suddenly very interested in the ground. No one says anything, but several cover their mouths with their sleeves so their laughter won’t show, and they don’t entirely succeed.

I see the disciple’s face turn red as he realizes this, but he simply smooths his robe with a brief gesture, turns around and walks off up the street, unhurried and without a word.

But before turning a corner he looks back just once and looks at the three of us, one by one, like someone memorizing a face for when they need it again, and then he disappears, with his companions following behind him.

In my other life, that look would have meant an unpleasant meeting the next time we ran into each other in the elevator, but here, in his neighborhood, I have no idea what it means, and I don’t feel like finding out today.

“We’re leaving”, I say.

“But we haven’t even seen the last street yet”, Xia tells me.

“That’s exactly why”, I reply. “If he comes back, he certainly won’t come back alone, and I’d rather not be here to count how many there are.”

Lianhua is already behind the chair before I finish the sentence, and we leave the quarter the way we came in, with the smell of medicine clinging to our clothes.

Xia walks two streets beside me without saying a single word, although after a while she asks me in a low voice whether she went too far.

“A little”, I tell her.

“But was I right or not?” she asks me.

“About the impurities, yes”, I reply. “About all the good parts, no. But you already knew that.”

Xia thinks it over for a moment.

“I’m sorry, I got carried away”, she tells me, looking contrite.

And then, as if nothing had happened, she asks me what we are going to do next.

What I have in mind is that, according to the Tower of the Five Dragons’ guide, there is a small area of shops and entertainment not far away, and it is a good place to spend the rest of the morning and get rid of the bad taste the argument has left in our mouths.

When we arrive, I see that it is a few narrow streets, with colored awnings that tint the light depending on which one you pass under, cloth shops, fan stalls and a woman with honey sweets stacked in pyramids. And on a corner, standing on a stool, a storyteller is telling a ring of kids how a monkey with a magic staff takes on a band of bandits.

That surprises me, because the monkey he is talking about is clearly Sun Wukong, but that fight against bandits doesn’t appear anywhere in the novel.

I push the matter out of my head, although I am still wondering how on earth my story made its way to this city, when Xia asks the sweets woman how she keeps the honey from running, and the woman, instead of answering her, gives her one to try with a smile, which Xia considers a perfectly valid answer.

And in the middle of the second street, I find a bookshop.

It is small, with shelves up to the ceiling and an aisle the chair barely fits through, with the armrests brushing the spines. The bookseller, an older man with ink-stained fingers, looks at my chair, looks at me and goes back to his book, which is exactly what a bookseller should do.

And as Lianhua slowly guides me down the aisle, I realize that I haven’t read anything for pleasure since I left the Empire, and that everything I have read has been work, so I decide that today I am looking for the opposite.

In the end I find more than I expected. The story of a general lost in the desert, another about two merchant families who have spent a hundred years ruining each other, ghost stories, legends about river spirits and a romance novel with a cover that makes Xia turn red the moment she sees it.

I could have taken many more, but this is where I hold myself back.

At the Palace I would have taken half the bookshop without thinking, but here I have what we earn from my talismans, so each of those books is the equivalent of a few sheets of talisman paper I won’t be able to buy later.

The bookseller wraps everything in paper tied with string, and I set it in my lap with both hands on top, although I look with a smile at Xia, who has refused to look at the romance novel since I added it to the pile.

After leaving the bookshop I feel a little hungry, so we politely ask a passerby for the best restaurant in the area, and the passerby doesn’t hesitate for an instant, pointing us right away to one at the end of the street, with two red lanterns at the door and an embroidered cloth curtain at the entrance.

When we arrive, I see that in front of the curtain there is a man in a gray silk robe, with his hands behind his back and the face of someone whose only job is to decide who goes through that curtain and who doesn’t.

Lianhua pushes me up to him and stops, because the man is looking down at me. Then he looks at the chair, slowly, lingering on the wheels. And then he looks at our clothes, which are of good fabric and good cut, but have nothing about them that screams money.

“I’m sorry”, he tells us. “We have no room today.”

As he says it, two men in silks embroidered with gold thread arrive behind us, and the man at the door steps aside to let them pass with a bow. One of them looks at me as he passes, looks at the chair and says something to the other that I don’t quite catch, but that makes the other snort with laughter. Behind them comes a woman laden with hairpins, who walks past me with her chin a little higher than necessary.

The curtain closes behind them.

“And them you let in?” Xia asks him.

“They have a table”, the man replies.

“They just got here!” Xia tells him.

The man doesn’t reply to her, but he looks at us again, and this time he is clearer when he speaks.

“Besides, this establishment is not prepared for…”, he tells us, and makes a vague gesture with his hand toward my wheels. “For that.”

“Repeat that, please”, Lianhua tells him.

She says it in the politest voice in the world, even flatter than usual, without a single edge.

But I recognize that tone at once, because I have heard that voice from her only a few times, and it has almost never ended well for whoever was in front of her.

Chen Mo already warned me that I was going to come across innkeepers who would charge me triple after seeing me, and things considerably worse. A doorman who won’t let me in doesn’t even make the list of the worst I can imagine, and I have no intention of letting whatever might happen next spoil my day.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “We’re leaving.”

“But, Wen…”, Xia says to me, and she doesn’t seem satisfied with the treatment I have received either.

“I’m not going to pay to eat somewhere I’m not wanted”, I reply. “And I’m not going to argue so they’ll let me pay them, either.”

Because I once told Lianhua that I didn’t want to see her hurt defending a pride that doesn’t matter to me, and what does matter to me isn’t behind that curtain. It is out here, on both sides of my chair.

The man at the door inclines his head a finger’s breadth, with the calm satisfaction of someone who has done his job well, although I have to grant him that at least he doesn’t gloat over having won, as others would have.

Lianhua looks at him a moment longer than necessary, but then she positions herself behind my chair, turns it, and we head down the street, with steam coming out of Xia’s ears, almost literally.

Two streets away there is a park with willows, and in a corner, under an awning, a food stall with two enormous pots and half a dozen wooden tables in the open air, beneath the trees.

It smells of broth, ginger and something fried.

The owner, a strong-armed woman with an apron that has seen better days, sees us arrive, looks at the chair and, without saying a word, removes the bench from the head of an empty table so the chair will fit.

“What’ll it be?” she asks us, kindly and without any awkward questions that would be out of place.

We order noodles in broth and some fried morsels that Xia identifies at the first bite, and the three of us sit at the same table, and as I slurp the first noodle, I remember Xi’An.

The first time I went out into the streets in that city, before I met Xia, when I was eight years old and ate at a place very much like this one, in the open air, with wooden tables and a pot over the fire. Only that day there were no free tables when we arrived, so they moved a customer off their table to give it to me, and then they served us before anyone else.

I realized at that very moment that I hadn’t done anything to deserve it, except be my father’s daughter.

In Xi’An they gave me a table for being who I was, and today they have denied me one because of my condition and the clothes I am wearing.

And these noodles, served to me by a woman who was kind enough to make room for me, taste considerably better than anything there might be behind that curtain.

In the afternoon we keep wandering aimlessly, which is a luxury that in this life I have almost never been able to afford.

Lianhua chooses the streets. At each crossing she stands still for a couple of heartbeats, her gaze unfocused, and I know she is looking from above with the Vision of Horus to see where each one leads before deciding.

And Sanjiang, seen like this, unhurried and with no fixed destination, is exactly the city full of people with powers that I could never see from an imperial carriage.

A man carries on his back a load of firewood that in my world would have needed a mule, and he carries it whistling. Some boys drag swords that reach almost to the ground and argue at the top of their lungs about who would have won a fight that hasn’t happened yet. Some wandering cultivators sell beast pelts on blankets, and on a wall there is a commission board that, from the little I can read from my height, is asking for wolf pelts, herbs and escorts.

But something is missing, because no one flies, no one leaps from rooftop to rooftop or walks on the river, which takes a little of the charm out of being in a city full of people with powers.

Throughout the whole outing, the looks at my chair are still there, as always, and as always I let them be, since they don’t go beyond that, looks.

When the sky begins to turn orange above the rooftops and the first lanterns are lit in the doorways, Lianhua turns toward the river.

Halfway to the dock, on a street that slopes downhill, we find a small restaurant, a single room, with the door wide open and a smell of roast pork drifting out into the street.

The owner, a short man with a cloth over his shoulder, sees us at the door, looks at the chair and scratches the back of his neck, but then he opens the other leaf of the door, which was closed, so the wheels can get through without scraping the frame.

“There’s a table at the back, by the window”, he tells us. “You can see the river from there.”

The menu isn’t very extensive, but we order a little of everything, Xia especially, and in the end, as we pay, she even asks him for the recipe for one of the dishes, which she praises so much that the owner, embarrassed, actually gives it to her.

At the dock it is almost night, but that is no problem for Lianhua, who takes me down the ramp carefully and anchors my chair, which Xia, as always, holds on to just in case as she sits down beside it.

Lianhua pushes the boat away from the dock with one foot and begins to row, and behind us Sanjiang stays lit by the light of its lanterns.

Xia manages to stay awake until the second islet, after which her head drops against the back of my chair, although even asleep she doesn’t let go of the armrest.

And I sit watching the water, with the books in my lap and the lights of the city trembling on the river, while I think that, if I had stayed in the Empire, today I would have reached the age of majority.

Tomorrow, in some office of the Palace, someone from the court would have asked me officially what I wished to devote myself to beyond my rank. I would have given the answer everyone already expected of me, in the measured voice of a Zhāohuán, and then others would have been the ones to decide what I was really going to do.

Here no one is going to ask me officially, but this morning Xia asked me, with a plate of buns in her hands, and the answer was whatever I felt like at that moment.

Lianhua rows without saying anything, the boat slips between the islands of the Rong on its way home, and I, for the first time, feel that my future is mine to decide.