“Mo Ti was my favourite,” she replied. “His idea that almost everything which one could do made the situation worse, appeals to some laziness in me. It is a very easy doctrine to justify, superficially at least. Here we are in comparative discomfort, jolting towards doubtful safety, while I might so easily be lying untidily in my own palace gardens after a short instant of knowledge—the knowledge of the reality of a steel blade.”
“There are other deaths which rebels give to favourites,” he said. “And Mo Ti did not so much, my uncle says, urge doing nothing as he urged that everything was, however disguisedly, good. Besides, Mencius put Mo Ti in a very small place, so far as philosophy is concerned. So let us speak no more of Mo Ti, but of yourself, for it is not every day that I drive with you.”
She looked away, into the quickening light.
“I am a poor excuse,” she said. “But for me, this trouble would not have come on my country or my Emperor. I know—indeed I know—that with me he forgot statecraft and preparation for wars. Through silken curtains the war gongs do not sound. My
Ah Lai countered: “If you think that I am doing this service for General Tung, without being certain that General Tung will take advantage of it, you think wrong. No: all will be well—we shall go into the distant mountains and, with fresh, loyal troops return to strike the heads from traitors. Do not concern yourself with strategy: you are a woman, and a woman’s strategy is different from the strategy of men. You are fitted to be what you are, and therefore safe from dangers which afflict us. As they say, a hunchback has many advantages: he can earn a living by washing without noticing his bent back, and he is safe from the army.”
“You compare me to a hunchback?” she laughed. “Your uncle would have made no such mistake.”
He answered: “I did not mean to compare you, and that you know well.”
They drove on. The countryside was less barren now.
Later, she asked him: “This girl of yours, Winter Cherry, why have you left her behind you?”
“You would not understand,” he replied. “To you, who have always had whatever you desired, it is impossible to explain how lovers may separate without quarrels, in order to meet later.”
She tossed her head.
“Who are you to say that I should not understand?” she cried. “No facet of love can go unscanned for one who loves an Emperor and is loved by him.” Then, as suddenly swerving as a bird, her mood changed. “I will sing you a song.” She tuned her voice to the rhythm of the wheels.
She stopped singing and looked at him sideways.
Ah Lai said: “To your song about Winter Cherry I can only reply with a reminder that you, too, will grow old, and that your lover, the Emperor, has grown old already. Do you (since revenge is always brutal) take pleasure in the touch of a man so many years old? Do you (since you did not spare me pain) enjoy his lack-lustre eye, his hollow cheek? Do you (since we are alone here) find in his bed the rhythm of a dance and the laughter of a light moment in unnoticed sunshine? Do you . . . .”
She replied through her teeth: “Turn the carriage round.”
He shook the reins so that the horses went faster. “No,” he answered, “I cannot do that. I serve General Tung, and through him the Emperor. It is not my custom to take orders from a woman. Still, if what I have said is too offensively truthful, consider that only the wind has heard it.”
They drove without speaking further, until, on a hill, the horses slowed. Then, as if this broke her thought, she hummed gently the old interminable driving-song.
“There is a carriage coming towards us,” Ah Lai said. “I shall ask the driver the way.”
“Do so,” Kuei-fei answered. The boy felt that she did not altogether welcome the interruption.