Let the older women, who need to spend time each day painting away lines, struggle to find ways to keep the attention of clients: clapping and smiling at drunken, mumbled verses, placing a pipa strategically in front of fallen breasts. Amber tends to find that standing a certain way, then just looking across the room at a man is enough.
At this particular moment of an almost-summer night, however, in the large, subtly lit reception room of the White Phoenix, crowded with a variety of men and a number of perfumed women, circumstances are otherwise.
No one is looking at Amber, though she's positioned herself by her favourite lamp near an archway and knows her hair is beautiful tonight.
Even one of her regular clients, the cavalry officer she has thoughts about, is among those crowding the central platform. On that platform, a soft-bellied, badly groomed, considerably intoxicated man well past his middle years is reciting a verse about—as best Amber can tell—a wife and her absent husband.
It is, she feels strongly, insulting.
The poet is proceeding slowly—in part, because he stops to take a drink every few lines. This poem is not (alas!) one of their brief, formal things. This one, he declared (his voice is not deep but it carries), is a ballad, whatever that is.
Well, Amber knows one cursed thing it is: long.
She makes herself smile with that. No one notices. One of the other girls, looking as if she was on the cresting edge of extreme desire, had breathed the word immortal when the poet came in some little time ago.
The Banished Immortal.
It is laughable. Amber wants to laugh but knows she'd be in trouble if she did. Where she comes from, an immortal, exiled from heaven for whatever reason, would have to look a great deal more as if he knew how to use the sword that lies beside the poet now, and would surely have the dignity to not be so obviously unable to stop himself from drinking cup after cup of their best grape wine.
It hasn't happened yet, but she expects his voice to start slurring soon—if he even manages to remain upright. This one isn't going to be much use to himself or the girl he takes upstairs, Amber thinks. Sometimes, if the man is too drunk to use you properly he leaves a larger sum, to have a girl keep quiet about his embarrassment.
She doesn't think this one, this immortal in his dusty, wine-stained clothing, is likely to care.
He is still reciting to an unnaturally silent room, and still drinking another cup every few lines. He's impressive in that, at least, Amber concedes. Two of the girls, hovering by the platform, visibly excited, hasten to refill his cup, taking turns. Amber wonders if their nipples are hard. She is tempted to have a coughing fit or cause a lamp to topple, so annoyed is she by this spectacle. No one is looking at her, no one is talking or even whispering to anyone else, no one is taking any of the women to another room, and the owner doesn't look as if she cares in the least.
Incredulously, Amber realizes that some of the girls—and many of the men—have tears in their eyes. Tears! Bright Amber is from a land famed for horses and women, and for men who fight bare-chested with knives, priding themselves on their scars.
She is seventeen and a half years old, has been in the White Phoenix for a little more than two years now. But honestly, she thinks, she could live among these Kitan till she was dried up like an end-of-autumn grape, bent like an ox-cart wheel, and she'd never understand them, or how the Celestial Empire dominates the world they know.
She is thinking this, outraged and aggrieved, when another man steps quietly into the room, following Lotus through the open doorway. Lotus just watches at the entrance now, greets arrivals, too old to ever be asked to go to a room with a man any more. Her hands are twisted, painful in rain and wind, she can't even play the pipa properly. Apparently she was the best of all of them, once.
Amber sees Lotus bow to this man, as low as she can, twice, as she backs out to the portico. That—of course—is the usual sign to all of them: this one is important, has money.
No one but Amber is even looking.
She runs a quick hand to her bright hair, checking the pins that hold it in place. Prepares her smile for when his gaze finds her beside the lamp.
It doesn't. He stops where he stands. His mouth opens. He stares—it is too upsetting—at the poet on his raised platform. The new arrival's expression is awed, disbelieving.
He has money to spend, Lotus has signalled it. He's young, presentable. You might even call this one handsome (unusual, deep-set eyes). Amber wants him to look at her with that dazzled expression, as she unbinds her golden hair and slowly, teasingly, discards silken clothing in a private room and kneels gracefully to attend to him.
She swears, not quietly enough. Two of the older women turn back to glare at her. Amber offers the response that makes the most sense at this particular moment: she sticks out her tongue.
In the teachings of the Path, beliefs to which he'd tried, erratically, to adhere, Tai knew that coincidence, the fortuitous encounter, was to be accepted with composure.
If grim and unpleasant, such moments were properly understood as tasks, lessons one was meant to master. If benevolent, they were gifts to be humbly received.
Sometimes there was no obvious tilt towards one side or other of that balancing, there was simply a moment, an event, that startled in its unexpectedness.
Regarding these, there was a dispute among teachers. Some said the wayfarer's task was to interpret the meaning of the moment as best he could, and respond appropriately. Others taught that there were moments in a life that did not admit of understanding until long after. At such times, they counselled, one was merely to experience, and strive towards comprehension in the fullness of time.
That Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal, most beloved poet of the empire, should be in the reception hall of the White Phoenix Pleasure House of Chenyao, declaiming one of the poems Tai loved most in the world, felt—immediately—to be one of those moments that could not possibly be grasped.
There was no point even trying. Be in the room, Tai told himself. Be aware of all of this. Gather it.
Before anything else, however, it made sense to close his mouth, which was hanging open like that of a child watching fireworks at the Chrysanthemum Festival.
He took a few cautious steps forward. The women, their silks in many colours, like butterflies or flowers, were exquisitely trained in an expensive house. Perfumed deliciously, they made way for him, lingering close in subtle and less-subtle ways to read how he responded, what he liked.
Girls like these, and the wine they offered, and their flute and pipa music, had been what he'd dreamed about for two years. They almost didn't matter now.
He moved forward a little more, among other men around the platform. Merchants and soldiers, provincial bureaucrats in their belted gowns. No students, not in a border town, or a house this expensive.
Up close, there was resistance as Tai tried to get nearer to the poet. He saw a willowy girl bend, her hair swept up stylishly, the curves of her perfect breasts showing, to pour for Sima Zian as he paused between verses. He waited for her, smiled, drank off the entire cup. He hesitated, resumed: