Chapter 219 Interlude 31 (Patreon)

The door of the Purple Garden Inn is exactly as Xia remembers it.

Two leaves of dark wood flung wide open, and above them, a lacquered sign with the inn’s name in characters so elegant that, the day they arrived in the city, Xia thought they were too pretty to hang above a door.

Clearly the only thing that has changed is her.

Because that day she came in behind Wen’s chair, with a backpack on her back and her eyes looking everywhere at once, and today she is standing in front of the threshold with a small leather satchel hanging from her shoulder, holding the strap with both hands in case anyone tries to take it from her.

The satchel is of ordinary leather, without decoration, and inside it she carries only the knife roll, which takes up almost all the space.

Lianhua is beside her, since she has escorted her here without saying anything, and now, in front of the door, she turns toward her, straightens the satchel strap with a short tug and looks her up and down.

Xia stays still while she looks at her, since this morning she has done her hair three times. The first time, the knot came out crooked. The second, a lock came loose as soon as she bent down to pick up the satchel. And the third time it was Lianhua who took the comb out of her hand without saying a word and did it herself, with the same care and the same speed with which she does everything else.

“You do not have to worry”, Lianhua tells her. “You only need to do the same thing you do at home, and I am sure that will be enough.”

And that is all, since after saying it she turns to walk away, crossing the square toward the Tower of the Five Dragons without looking back once.

Xia stays watching her back until the people in the square hide it from view, and then she is alone.

She would like to be able to say that it doesn’t matter to her, because for four days now she has been thirteen years old and is no longer a little girl. But the truth is that in the last year she hasn’t gone anywhere in this city without Wen and Lianhua at her side, and this is the first time she has been alone outside the house.

So, to keep from thinking about that, she thinks about what Lianhua told her last night, as they were clearing the table beneath the magnolia.

That the spirit chef of this inn had been one of the first she had met since she started asking about them at the Tower, that he wasn’t one of those who accepted apprentices just like that, and that if he had accepted Xia, according to Lianhua, it had been mainly because some of the kitchen staff still remembered the girl who spent half the day among their stoves when they were staying here, and had gone to speak well of her to him.

Xia doesn’t quite know how to take that, since, on the one hand, she is glad to know that someone in that kitchen has remembered her for almost a year. But on the other, it means they didn’t accept her for what she knows how to do, but because others spoke well of her.

And that means that as soon as she crosses that door, she is going to have to prove she isn’t just a nice little girl.

She breathes in deeply, so deeply that she feels her clothes tighten across her chest, lets the air out slowly and goes in.

Inside, the vestibule is cool and smells of polished wood. At the back there is a counter of reddish wood, and behind the counter, a young woman with her hair gathered up and a register open in front of her, who looks up when she hears her come in.

“Good morning”, she tells her. “How can I help you?”

She says it with a kind, slightly condescending smile, mainly because it is unusual to see a girl come into the inn alone.

“I’ve come to see Master An”, Xia replies.

The woman looks at her, and her smile fades a little when she realizes Xia isn’t a customer.

“Ah”, the woman tells her. “You must be the one they’re expecting.”

She closes the register with one hand.

“Do you need someone to show you to the kitchen?” she asks her.

“There’s no need, thank you”, Xia replies. “I know where it is.”

The woman just nods and points her to the passage at one side of the counter, so Xia thanks her again with a slight nod and goes through it.

And it is true that she knows where it is; in fact, she could get there with her eyes closed, so she crosses a covered gallery that runs around the first courtyard and passes several doors without stopping, until, as she passes one door, she glances at it sideways.

She looks at it because behind it is the three-room courtyard where they lived those first days, and morning after morning, Xia went out through that door to fetch breakfast from the kitchen.

At first she only went for that, to fetch it and bring it back. But one day she criticized the way a kitchen hand was cutting the vegetables, which made someone put a knife and a basket of scallions in front of her a moment later, and from then on the hard part was no longer getting into that kitchen, but getting her out of it, so in the end she spent almost half the day inside.

It was also there that they told her what a spirit chef was, and it was there that she decided that was what she wanted to be, long before she dared to tell Wen.

The smell reaches Xia before she arrives, with its mix of hot oil, ginger, bone broth that has been on the fire for hours and, beneath all of that, the sweetish smell of steamed rice, which is the same in every kitchen in the world.

The gallery ends in a service courtyard, with a well in the center beside a row of empty baskets stacked against the wall, and on the other side of the courtyard is the kitchen door, both leaves closed and the noise of a kitchen on the other side.

Xia stops in front of it, rubs one hand with the other, slowly, as if she were brushing flour off her fingers, breathes in deeply again, and opens the door.

The outer kitchen is large, long and full of people, with a row of stoves against the back wall, steam rising from half a dozen bamboo baskets, cleavers striking cutting boards at a rhythm that sounds almost like heavy rain and someone shouting that the rice is sticking at someone else who, apparently, isn’t listening.

It is exactly as Xia remembers it, to the point that, for a moment, she forgets she is nervous.

Some of the people in the kitchen turn toward the door when they hear it open.

The first to recognize her is Mrs. Fu, who is sitting on the same stool as always, by the window, with her sleeves rolled up and a tub of radishes between her knees.

“Why, if it isn’t little Xia!” she says, while the cleaver goes still in her hand.

“Good morning, Mrs. Fu”, Xia tells her.

After that, more people look toward the door. Kang Ping, the wok man, who raises his ladle above the smoke by way of greeting without stopping stirring with his other hand. Hu Mei, the kitchen hand, who must be three or four years older than her and who passes by her with a tower of bowls in her arms and winks at her, mostly because she doesn’t have a free hand for anything else. And two or three others Xia knows by sight, although she never learned their names, who smile at her or nod.

Xia returns every greeting, one by one, with a slight bow and a good morning for each of them, and notices that she is smiling without being able to help it.

But then, from among the stoves, Guo Dahai appears.

He is the head of the outer kitchen, the man who decides who cuts what, who watches which pot and at what time each tray goes out, and who back then moved her away from the big stove three times and all three times let her come back after a while. He is big, broad-shouldered and thick-armed, and he dries his hands on his apron as he crosses the kitchen toward her.

He stops in front of Xia and looks down at her.

“Master An is waiting for you”, he tells her.

Xia nods, but she realizes that she nods too fast, and twice besides, and she realizes it halfway through the second nod, but by then it is too late to fix it.

Guo Dahai says nothing more; he simply turns around and starts walking toward the back of the kitchen, so Xia follows him, close at his back, between the stoves, the tables and the people coming and going with trays, until they reach the door at the back.

It is a door of pale wood, plain, without any decoration, and the last time Xia saw it, it was closed, just like every other time.

Because in all those days no one from the outer kitchen went through it in front of her, except Guo Dahai, and the others, when they passed in front of it with something in their hands, lowered their voices a little without realizing it. And when Xia asked what was on the other side, Mrs. Fu answered, without looking up from the radishes, that it was where Master An cooked.

And she added that no one went in there whom Master An didn’t want to go in.

Guo Dahai opens the door and goes in, and Xia goes in behind him.

The first thing she notices when she enters is the silence.

It isn’t total silence, because inside she can also hear the crackle of a fire and the dry knock of a knife against a board, but after the noise of the outer kitchen it comes very close.

The inner kitchen is smaller, with light coming in through narrow windows near the ceiling, which is higher than that of the kitchen outside. There are three long tables of polished stone, two small stoves and, against the walls, shelves full of jars and closed boxes with handwritten labels.

The second thing she notices is that it smells different.

Xia couldn’t say of what, of something she can’t name that makes the hair on her arms stand on end.

For an instant she is tempted to activate Sensing the Qi to find out what it is, because one of the tables already falls within the eight Chi the technique reaches, and on that table there is an open box. But she doesn’t, since she doesn’t know whether in this kitchen that would be bad manners, and she would rather not find out on her first day.

The third thing she notices is that there are three people inside.

Two of them are at the tables, and the third has his back to her, in front of one of the small stoves, watching something boiling in a clay pot.

“Master An”, Guo Dahai tells him. “Your new apprentice has arrived.”

The man at the stove turns around, revealing a figure who appears middle-aged, although among cultivators that doesn’t mean much. He is tall and thin, and he wears his hair, black though with a few gray strands at the temples, gathered under a white cloth. He has his sleeves tied above his elbows, revealing long, lean forearms.

But what catches Xia’s attention most are his hands, which are completely clean, and his eyes, which look at her steadily without any hurry, but in a way far too similar to the look one gives a fish at the market when one hasn’t yet decided whether it is fresh.

So Xia stands at attention, with her back straight, her hands clasped in front of her, her feet together and her chin neither too high nor too low, exactly as Lianhua taught her at the Palace, when the only way to stay and live there was to become an apprentice handmaiden.

Lianhua made her repeat that posture so many times that, even today, it comes out by reflex whenever she is in front of someone important.

The other men in the room are looking at her too.

They are younger than Master An, or so it seems. The one at the nearest table has a round face, a smudge of flour on one sleeve and eyes that run over her from head to toe with a curiosity he doesn’t bother to hide. And the other, the one at the table at the back, is older and thinner, with a narrow face, and he has left his knife still on the board to look at her with something that is clearly not curiosity.

Xia notices that his look resembles, rather, the one Lianhua gets when a stranger comes too close to Wen’s chair.

Behind Xia, Guo Dahai inclines his head toward Master An and leaves without saying anything more. The door closes behind him, and the noise of the outer kitchen disappears.

“Are you Ling Xia?” Master An asks her.

He has a deep, calm voice, that of someone used to not needing to raise it to be listened to.

“Yes, Master An”, Xia replies.

Master An looks her up and down again, slowly, and Xia has to make an enormous effort to stay still.

“In principle, I already have two apprentices”, he tells her.

He raises a hand and points with it, first at the round-faced one and then at the one at the table at the back.

“Zhou Bai”, he says. “And Du Heng.”

Zhou Bai smiles at her; Du Heng doesn’t.

“But in the outer kitchen everyone has spoken well of you”, Master An continues. “So I have decided, at the very least, to test you to see whether you have what it takes to be a spirit chef.”

He pauses.

“Because not everyone does”, he finishes.

He says it without any harshness, and for that very reason Xia’s stomach tightens a little.

“Thank you very much for the opportunity, Master An”, she tells him as she makes a slight bow. “And I will do my very best not to let that trust down.”

“That is a good attitude”, Master An tells her next. “As I agreed with the woman who came to arrange your apprenticeship, you will come every other day for the day shift, since she said she did not want you to have to stay late, given your age. Do you have any problem with that?”

“None, Master An”, Xia tells him. “I will follow your instructions at all times.”

Master An nods after hearing her, but then he turns toward his two apprentices, who haven’t stopped watching them for a moment.

“Carry on with your work”, he tells them.

Zhou Bai lowers his eyes to his board right away, although Xia is almost sure he is still listening on the sly. Du Heng takes a little longer, but in the end he too picks up his knife and goes back to cutting.

After seeing that the apprentices are back at their work, Master An looks at Xia again.

“Do you know anything about spirit cooking?” he asks her.

Xia opens her mouth, and closes it again.

Because she is tempted to answer that yes, she knows a great deal, and to blurt out all at once everything she has spent a year reading. But Master An hasn’t asked her how much she has read, but how much she knows, which isn’t the same thing.

And if she starts by embellishing the first thing she is asked, it could leave a bad impression, so she decides to tell the truth.

“I opened my first Gate very recently”, she replies. “The Earth Gate.”

Master An says nothing, so Xia continues.

“So until now I’ve only been able to read books”, she tells him. “About the kinds of spiritual foods and about cooking techniques. And to try those techniques, mostly, with ordinary foods.”

She rubs her hands together in front of her, slowly, and makes herself stop.

“I know they’re useless with ordinary foods”, she continues. “But that way I was getting familiar with how they’re done.”

And then she falls silent, because she realizes that isn’t the whole truth.

She thinks about it for a moment, with her eyes on the stone table closest to her, and decides that, if she is going to tell the truth, it is better to tell all of it.

“And I have cooked spirit food too”, she adds. “But I cooked it as if it were ordinary food, since I didn’t dare try the techniques from the books on it in case I got it wrong and ruined it.”

After those words she stays still, since she expects some kind of scolding, but Master An nods, slowly, and it seems to Xia that he does so with satisfaction.

“When in doubt, with spirit food it is better not to do anything strange”, he tells her. “You did the right thing.”

Xia lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding when she hears his answer.

“And what books have you read?” Master An asks her.

That question she does know how to answer, so she searches her memory for a moment before replying.

“The first was one on spirit herbs”, she tells him. “How to recognize them, when they are gathered and how they are dried without losing their Qi.”

Master An nods.

“Then the one on mushrooms”, Xia continues. “Which has a whole part devoted to the poisonous ones, and which is…”

She stops just in time, because she was going to say it is the best part, and she isn’t sure that is the most appropriate thing to say to a master chef on the first day.

“Very thorough”, she finishes.

Master An nods again.

“One on spirit fruits”, Xia continues. “About how to peel them so the Qi doesn’t escape when the skin breaks, and which ones should never be peeled. Another on fish, on how to cut them. Two on spirit beasts, on which parts are used and how to butcher them without spoiling the meat.”

She takes a breath.

“One on roots”, she continues. “One on spiritual grains, mostly rice. One on kinds of cuts. Another on fire and how long each ingredient lasts before the heat draws the Qi out of it. One on broths and sauces. One on how to make preserves, which I didn’t like much, but I read it anyway…”

And she keeps going.

Because it isn’t only the books from that first pile Lianhua brought back from the bookshop in the backpack. Over the course of this year they have bought her more, one here and another there, and Xia has read them all, most of them more than once, and some so many times that their pages are already dog-eared.

And as she lists them, she realizes that Master An has stopped nodding.

At first he nodded with each book, but at some point between the one on beasts and the one on grains he began to do it only now and then, and since the one on broths he hasn’t done it at all. He simply looks at her, with his eyebrows a little higher than before.

And at the nearest table, Zhou Bai’s knife hasn’t struck the board for a good while.

But there is one book Xia keeps to herself, because that book came from a Celestial Fragment, Wen translated it, and Xia has no intention of saying anything that could reveal Wen’s secret.

“And that’s all”, she finishes.

For a moment, nothing can be heard in the inner kitchen but the fire.

Master An looks at her, and this time he doesn’t look at her as he did before, but seriously, like someone who has just realized that the dish placed in front of him has more ingredients than it seemed.

“You have prepared yourself very well”, he tells her.

Xia feels her ears grow warm.

“When you want to do something, it’s always better to prepare ahead of time”, she replies.

And then, because that came out too serious and too much like something Lianhua would say, she lowers her eyes a little and adds something more, in a quieter voice.

“And it’s also that I like reading about cooking”, she tells him.

Master An smiles after hearing Xia.

It is the first time he has done so since she came in, and it isn’t a big smile, but it changes his face, and suddenly he looks much less like a man deciding whether a fish is fresh and much more like someone you can talk to about fish.

“That is a good hobby”, he tells her.

He leans with one hand on the edge of the stone table, and from the way he does it, Xia understands that the most serious part of the conversation is over.

“And apart from everything you have learned from books, do you have anything else that could be of help to you in a kitchen?” he asks her.

Xia stays silent for a moment, because she knows perfectly well what he is asking her.

One never asks about someone’s techniques, everyone knows that, and Master An hasn’t done so; he has only left the door open, so that she can be the one to decide whether or not she wants to walk through it.

And Xia decides that she does, since sooner or later she is going to have to use them in the kitchen and they will stop being a secret anyway.

“I have a technique that lets me sense Qi even though I don’t have all the Gates open yet”, she tells him. “That way I can handle spiritual foods more precisely.”

Master An says nothing, but he doesn’t look away either.

“And I have another that lets me, for now, handle two objects around me”, Xia continues. “As long as they aren’t very heavy.”

She doesn’t tell him what they are called, or what else they do, or that the two of them have cost her four days of training with Lianhua in the courtyard, or that on the first day eleven eggs fell to the floor, on the second four and on the third none, or that on the fourth Lianhua spent the day setting a row of bowls in front of her for her to say, one by one, which ones had something with Qi in them and which didn’t, until she got them all right three times in a row.

Master An tilts his head after Xia’s answer.

“You said for now”, he tells her. “Does that mean you will be able to handle more later on?”

“Yes”, Xia replies.

And right away, before he gets the wrong idea, she adds the rest.

“But I don’t know when”, she continues. “Because I learned it very recently and I still have to practice with it a lot.”

Master An looks at her a moment longer, and then he nods, and this time Xia is sure it is with satisfaction, because it shows even in the way he straightens up.

“With those two techniques you are already far ahead of many apprentices when they start”, he tells her. “So I have no objection to beginning to teach you.”

A smile escapes Xia, but Master An raises a finger before it has time to grow.

“The rest will depend on your performance”, he continues. “If I see that you begin to falter, or that you are not suited to it, I will not hesitate to tell you to leave.”

He says it in the same calm voice in which he has said everything else, and Xia knows it is true, because it is the same kind of voice in which Lianhua says the things she intends to carry out, so she bows.

A full bow, with her back straight and her hands clasped, held for exactly as long as is owed to a master.

“I will do everything I can so that doesn’t happen, Master An”, she tells him.

When she straightens up, Master An is looking at her with something that seems to Xia like approval, and at the next table, Zhou Bai goes back to cutting in a hurry, as if he hadn’t been watching.

Du Heng hasn’t stopped cutting at any point.

“Good”, Master An tells her. “Follow me. I am going to give you the set of knives you will use while you are in this kitchen.”

He turns toward one of the shelves at the back, where Xia sees, among the jars, a long, flat wooden box.

But Xia doesn’t move, because this is the moment, and she knows it, and she has spent the whole morning, ever since she did her hair the first time, knowing it was going to come and thinking about how to say it.

And none of the ways she has thought of seems good to her now.

“Master An”, she tells him.

It comes out quieter than she wanted, but Master An stops and turns to look at her all the same.

“I’ve brought my own knives”, Xia continues. “And they’re the ones I’d like to use.”

At the next table, Zhou Bai raises his head. And at the one at the back, for the first time since Master An told them to carry on with their work, Du Heng’s knife goes still.

Master An looks at her, and Xia sees that he isn’t angry, but he isn’t pleased either.

“Mere kitchen knives are not enough to be a spirit chef”, he tells her.

“I know”, Xia replies.

And before her courage fails her, she puts her hand into the satchel, takes out the knife roll of dark leather, tied with its two straps, and holds it out in front of her with both hands.

“If you like, you can examine them”, she tells him. “If after doing so you tell me I can’t use them, I’ll put them away again and won’t mention them again.”

Master An looks at her seriously, then looks at the knife roll, and then looks at her again, and the silence stretches out so long that Xia begins to hear her own heartbeat over the fire.

Finally, he goes over to the empty stone table, the one closest to the window, and stops at one side.

“Show me”, he tells her.

Xia goes over.

She sets the satchel on the floor, beside the leg of the table, undoes the two straps of the knife roll with slightly clumsy fingers and spreads it out carefully on the stone, from left to right, until it lies flat and the row of pockets is in view, from largest to smallest.

And in each pocket, one of the knives Lianhua gave her.

The light from the window strikes the blades from the side and, for an instant, their veins, like those of wood, seem to move.

Master An goes still when he sees the knives.

It is only a moment, barely a blink, but Xia notices it. She sees his eyes widen a little, and his hands stop halfway, as if they were about to move toward the table on their own.

And then she sees him put them behind his back and clasp them there.

After that, he leans over the table without touching anything, because they are someone else’s knives, and begins to look at them up close.

First the big cleaver. He gets so close to the edge that his nose almost brushes the blade, and he runs his eyes over it from the tip to the handle, and then from the handle to the tip. Then he looks at the spine of the bone cleaver, and at the handle, and at the joint between handle and blade, and spends a good while on the filleting knife, tilting his head to see how the light catches its edge.

Xia doesn’t move; in fact, she doesn’t even dare breathe too hard, just in case.

And the more Master An looks, the more surprised he seems. It shows in his eyebrows, which rise little by little, knife by knife, and in the fact that, when he reaches the little paring knife, he doesn’t even try to hide it anymore.

Zhou Bai has left his board and taken a step toward the table, craning his neck to see over his master’s shoulder. Du Heng hasn’t moved from his spot, but he hasn’t picked up his knife again either.

In the end, Master An straightens up, stays a moment looking down at the row of knives, with his hands still behind his back, and then looks at Xia.

“These knives, if you take care of them, will serve you practically your whole life”, he tells her.

And Xia smiles when she hears Master An’s words.

She can’t help it, because it is exactly what she thought the morning of her birthday, kneeling on the courtyard stones with the big cleaver in front of her face, although back then she didn’t dare say it out loud.

“Does that mean I can use them during my apprenticeship?” she asks him.

“Yes”, Master An replies. “You can use them.”

And after saying that, he simply turns around and starts walking toward the back of the inner kitchen.

“Follow me”, he tells her without turning around. “I have to explain what your tasks will be during the first days of your apprenticeship.”

Xia rolls up the knife roll quickly, although not so quickly that she does it badly, and ties the two straps while a hand no one can see holds the satchel open for her at waist height. She puts the knife roll inside, the invisible hand hangs the satchel back on her shoulder, and Xia realizes, as it does, that it is the first time she has used the Myriad in front of anyone other than Wen or Lianhua.

Then she follows Master An as he passes Zhou Bai’s table, who grins at her from ear to ear and mouths something that could be a welcome or could be a request for her to show him the knives later, and past Du Heng’s, who goes back to cutting without looking up.

Xia doesn’t know what tasks Master An is going to give her.

Maybe it will be scrubbing pots, or peeling radishes, or spending a whole week putting jars in order, like the first day she went into the Palace kitchens and Lianhua made her a kitchen hand, washing utensils and sorting spices.

She doesn’t care, because this time she is going to do them in order to learn to be a real chef, so she follows Master An with the satchel clutched in her hands and a smile she can’t wipe off her face.

Although she doesn’t try to, either.