“Was,” she admitted. “I am not like girls who turn the colour of peonies when a man sees them. First cut my hair like a boy’s. We shall not burn the hair, as they suggested, for that would be unlucky. I shall take it with me and bury it beside the road. Cut quickly. Here.”
Ah Lai, between delight and diffidence, bungled his way through his unaccustomed task.
Outside the room, the poet Li Po and the eunuch Han Im looked at each other enquiringly and then, together, broke into laughter.
“We risk our necks, our comfort and our own respect,” Li Po said, “for the sake of a girl.”
“You have more to risk than I,” Han Im replied with the mock-bitterness which he felt that he should like to adopt. “But, seriously, even if matters had not thus come to a feminine head, I was beginning to find things intolerable. You remember that the Master said that if you could not alter a bad government, the only solution was to go away. And you know, as well as I, that here we have infatuation with a lady upsetting all the routine of rule, that the ever-present threat from the Northern borders needs but a signal to move South, and that An Lu-shan, son of a beaten Hun, whom the Emperor favoured and the Lady Yang adopted, requites their kindness by projected rebellion. If we stay, we risk death: if we go, we risk death. Let us go.”
“Yes,” agreed the poet, “that is almost exactly what you said a minute or two past. It gains, of course, by repetition. So let us collect such things as are essential. The boy is right about walking, instead of riding.”
“Your poems, in the chest?” Yan Im asked.
“Hsuan Tsung favours literature,” Li Po replied. “They will be safe with him, however his rage may bubble. I must find you a few ounces of silver.”
They put a few things into a black, shiny case.
“I have nothing else,” Li Po said.
In the room where Ah Lai was helping Winter Cherry to button clothes on the wrong side, she was saying much the same.
“I have nothing to take with me save this flute, and that is not mine. You—you have all the reputation of your honoured family, a reputation which your uncle has built higher. You have scholarship and the hope of more scholarship. One day you will have many sons to whom, in quiet confidence, you may leave the tending of your tombs. It is wrong that you should endanger all this for me, who am so small a thing in the eyes of the world.”
“The button-hole is a finger’s width lower,” he replied. “Here—let me do it. And so you think that I, who have only now balanced the world’s judgment against my own, shall be diverted from my intention? And this button here. So. One day I shall reverse the process.” Then, as tears gathered: “Be still! How can I button you if you shiver?”
Shortly the other two came into the room. Winter Cherry picked up her flute and Ah Lai thrust some things in a bundle.
“Paper—for writing,” he said as he tied it up. “There will be leisure.”
Then the four went out under the dim light of an impending dawn, through a private gate in the Imperial Gardens and so south, Li Po dropped the key of the gate into a stream as they passed.
“I would not wish others to use that gate,” he said.
As they rounded the walls and skirted the city, it was possible to see, ahead of them, the great mass of Chung-nan amidst its fellow hills.
“I have written,” said Li Po, as they plodded along the unending road, “much about travel. I have written of journeys and of meetings, I have praised the workman about his task and the scholar about his administration, I have sung of the delicate feet of girls (often, I confess, for the sake of an elusive rhyme) and only now do I begin to realise what this common means of human progression really implies in effort and discomfort. Such arches as my feet once had seem now to have collapsed like a broken buttress in dust and chaos, the muscles behind my knees ache like the jaw of a taciturn man who has been compelled to narrate to the magistrate the tales of his wife’s short-comings, and now it would appear that I have a stone in my shoe.”
Han Im said: “To laugh at oneself is to admit to cosmic insignificance. It is therefore that I venture to be reminded of certain beasts of burden which may be seen bearing their loads of merchandise into the cities of the North. They sway, these camels, like ships with ballast ill-secured, their pace seems at once slow and hurried, ungainly and yet untiring, and there is but one characteristic which (it seems to me) I fail ignominiously to share with them, since the gods have provided them with a store against thirst which I most conspicuously lack.”