“I am not hungry,” Winter Cherry said, following the men.
Li Po said over his shoulder: “Repeat that, if you can, when a few sauces have urged your stomach.”
The room into which they came bore, indeed, every sign of having witnessed a party of several people. On the round, central table not even had the bowls been piled. Dried melon-seeds in little saucers showed by their disarray that the meal had, in the usual way, been finished with conversation. On the long table at the side of the room uneaten food remained. The chicken soup had globules of congealed grease on its surface: the noodles recalled the tired roots of convolvulus: a solitary piece of fried duckskin still looked almost appetising.
“You may eat, or cook and eat,” Li Po said. “Here is a small stove for the table, sent to me by the Governor of Kwei Sek, charcoal, tinder and flint. Cooking vessels in the kitchen, I think.”
Winter Cherry said: “Your servants are very remiss. But this is to our advantage.” Then she busied herself with forgotten arts.
Han Im took the poet out on to the verandah and they went to stand on Flying Tiger Bridge.
“Life,” Han Im observed, moving his head in the direction of the sounds of Winter Cherry’s activities.
“Or death,” Li Po replied. “We all wait for death, even if we do not know that we are waiting. All this is temporary stuff. Only Chung-nan mountain, fifteen miles over there, where you cannot see it, is eternal. We three shall moulder; the palace, the capital, Chang-an itself, shall pass. Only the eternal mountain shall watch our passing, and the passing of our thoughts. Or is that but a poet’s fancy?”
“The girl has not wept yet,” Han Im said. “It would be good for her to weep. The Emperor’s pleasantries are best thus washed out.”
Li Po struck the porcelain balustrade of the bridge with the palm of his hand. “You and I,” he said, “know these truths. She will learn these truths. Han Im, I am weary of this life for a little. So are you. So must she be.”
Han Im agreed. “Yes.”
A little later Winter Cherry called them. She had warmed what food was warmable, had boiled fresh rice and put clean bowls and chopsticks.
“You were right about hunger,” she said to Li Po.
Han Im put a saucer of melon-seeds handy, and sat down with the poet. The two men split melon-seeds delicately between front teeth, watching the girl eat.
Li Po said: “Whatever I said about hunger—and I have forgotten what I said—the truth is this: food in freedom tastes like imagined food on the terraces of the gods in the illimitable red clouds of sunset, whereas food eaten under constraint, however well it be cooked, turns in the mouth to strings and balls of undigested matter. It is, I suppose, something to do with the saliva. Wang Wei would know, for he is a physician. But he is not here. What do you say, Han Im?”
The eunuch observed: “There are freedom and freedom. And some of us can never be wholly free. To Winter Cherry, who has before her all forms of freedom, the constraint of the Emperor’s palace doubtless clouds all her mind. To you, who have the freedom of words and who add to that the freedom of wine, the freedom to be self-supporting looms small. To me, who lack the most conspicuous of man’s freedom, all food tastes the same.”
“This duckskin,” Winter Cherry-said, thoughtfully, “is better than many words. All that you say is true and doubtless it is satisfying for a man thus to have all truths set in the black and white of words, yet for me there are unshed tears between my eyes and my food.”
Li Po said: “Let us leave her.”
Outside again, on the bridge, Han Im observed: “The Master told us that bad government is worse than a tiger. I look round and see the Empire failing. The Huns are inadequately held in the Northern frontiers: official business is neglected for the curve of a fair girl’s eyebrow, An Lu-shan has gathered his men and rebellion stands just the other side of T’ung Kuan Pass. Nightly, they say, the Emperor watches from his Calyx Tower for the chain of living lights which beacon to him over the miles the safety of that Pass. I have often thought with pleasure of death, and refrained only for her sake.” He nodded towards the Pavilion. “I feel in a way responsible for her, since she says that she finds my features and my habits like those of her father. A paradox, that! Oh to go away, where man finds herbs for food, when the rain of evening and the sun of midday encourage the fruits of nature, where there is no temporising with an Emperor or a conscience! On the slopes of Chung-nan . . .” He hummed an old song under his breath, then went on: “We could take the girl.”
Li Po picked up a yellow pebble from the path and dropped it into the water. “The eddies report, long after, that the pebble was dropped,” he said. “Yes, let us drop a pebble. Do they know that she is here? Or you?”
“No one knows as yet, but time is short,” Han Im replied. “Tomorrow, or full sun, will be too late. Have you a carriage and a reliable driver? She can cut her hair and dress as a boy dresses. And I have no money with me.”
“Let us be practical for once,” Li Po agreed. “You cut her hair and burn the pieces you have cut. I will first bring clothes for her and then will waken my driver.” Then he made the gesture of one who has just remembered something. “Of course! My nephew will do. I forgot that he was on a visit here. I had been keeping him out of the way of the Lady Yang. He drives a carriage and he has spare clothes for the girl. What could be better?”
Han Im agreed, and they went into the Pavilion, towards the sounds of two voices.
“My family name is Kuen, and my given names Ah Lai,” one voice was saying. “I am a man of Lung Pui, and am on a visit to my uncle here, the honourable poet Li Po. My age is nineteen years. My mother was his sister.”
Winter Cherry replied: “It would be of no avail for me to tell you my family name. My given names are Winter Cherry. I have seen not more than eighteen years. I am a girl in the palace of the Emperor, Hsuan Tsung, so you may as well put me out of your head.”
Ah Lai answered: “To ask me to put you out of my head is to ask an impossibility. Who are Emperors, that they should have you? No. I have tried in the past, like my uncle, to write poetry; I have learned the Four Books from end to end and read the other classics, but now I find myself tongue-tied, like a fish in a golden bowl that has not learned to speak, now that I have seen you. My lips seem gummed with gum from the southern provinces, my tongue adheres to the roof of my mouth, my eyes dumbly behold what my hands are too paralysed to grasp, and you ask me to put you out of my head!”
“It is not very good gum,” Winter Cherry laughed. Then the two men coughed and entered.
Li Po said: “If you wish to serve this lady, my nephew, serve her now, as we tell you. Fetch a set of your clothes and put them at her disposal. Aid her to cut off her hair and destroy the cuttings. Then get the carriage ready, for we four shall go to Chung-nan Mountain, fleeing from the haunts of men, and speed is our greatest need if we are to avoid being followed.”
Ah Lai replied: “I do not ask why you tell me this. Does a man ask of a peach-tree why its fruit are golden suns of delight? No, But if you wish to avoid following, we must walk. Carriages make a rumbling, and carriages leave wheel-tracks and much gossip amongst those who see them. But if four men walk on a road, it is afterwards as if they had not passed. Take thick shoes, for the mountain is, I believe, a full fifteen miles, and that only a fair road.”