Hearing Shen Wen’s words, Jiang Man felt as if struck by lightning; all she could think of was refuting her. But when the words reached her lips they fell apart into fragments—Jiang Man discovered she couldn’t even find a single argument to rebut her with.
She only felt hollow inside, as if nothing remained but a layer of living skin. Young as Jiang Man was, she was no different in the end from rotten wood hollowed out by insects and blight.
But what exactly had scooped out her heart and liver, leaving her fit only for execution—a living corpse with nothing but beauty—she could not say.
What exactly was wrong with what Shen Wen said? Every sentence was true, so why did it make her so angry?
Jiang Man steadied herself and finally said, “That I happen to possess something of use to the Female Scribe—has become my good fortune.”
At this, Shen Wen seemed genuinely surprised. She studied her a long while before saying, “Is that truly what you think?”
“I am a daughter of the Jiang clan. This body, hair and skin, came from my parents. Now that the time has come to repay a debt of gratitude, how could I fail to fulfill the loyalty owed by all the Jiangs?”
Sitting on the round stool, the distance between them was somewhat greater, but one lift of the head and she would meet Shen Wen’s eyes. For that reason, Jiang Man had at first kept her gaze averted; now, she refused to hide any longer.
Jiang Man said, “From the moment I came to serve at the Female Scribe’s side, I had already made my own resolution.”
Shen Wen smiled. “And what resolution was that?”
A thought flashed through Jiang Man’s mind—that lewd business—and her cheeks burned. She paused. “To go through fire and water for the Female Scribe.”
“A fine ‘through fire and water.’ The day we first met you declared you’d repay me with your life; now we’ve graduated to fire and water. Those who know understand you serve under me; those who don’t would think I was sending you off to war.” Shen Wen’s palm brushed lightly over her temple hair. “Spare me the grand talk, though. I’ve never been able to stomach it—especially from people who swear oaths. In my view, anyone who talks like that ought to put down half a deposit to show sincerity. ‘Through mountains of blades and seas of fire’? Then up the mountain of blades first. ‘May heaven strike me with five thunders if I break my word’? Then summon a lightning bolt for me to see.”
Her appearance was always both flamboyant and immaculate, and it was only now that Jiang Man noticed the fine strands so carefully arranged that morning had come loose—perhaps she had been out in the wind.
There was little wind tonight. Jiang Man had spent the day in the study; just outside the corridor stood several hollies large and small. Normally when wind rose, before a person knew it, the leaves carried the news first. Today the hollies had been perfectly still.
It was now the hour when the night markets were at their liveliest. Even if Shen Wen had taken it into her head to ride outside the carriage box, the traffic would surely have slowed any carriage. Where had she gone to catch a bout of wind?
“I don’t need you to go through fire and water for me.” Shen Wen’s gaze returned to the paper. “With those three moves of yours, even if you wanted to serve me, you’d fall short of the weight.”
Jiang Man said, “Then I was rash. From what the Female Scribe said before, I assumed the only thing I had to offer was my looks.”
Shen Wen looked over, smiling. “What, born with beauty, and you’re dissatisfied?”
“I would not dare.”
A soft laugh, threaded with an undeniable pressure: “So then, you were lying before.”
Jiang Man, not understanding, was about to protest and couldn’t help raising her head.
Shen Wen said, “If that’s not what you think, don’t say what you don’t mean. Go on then—by your own account, apart from this shell, what else do you have to offer?”
So they were still weighing her worth as a commodity.
Jiang Man was silent a moment, then rose and bowed toward Shen Wen. “What I say now comes from the heart, and having received permission, I dare not decline falsely. I will likely offend the Female Scribe, and beg forgiveness in advance.”
Shen Wen shook her head. “Today is your first examination. I’ll play examiner, you play the examinee—there’s no one else here, so speak freely.”
“Yes.” Jiang Man said, “In my humble view, apart from the Female Scribe’s immense kindness to the Jiang family, I have nothing at all to offer.”
Shen Wen’s brow arched; the back of her right hand propped her cheek. “Is that so? And what’s your reasoning?”
“By the Female Scribe’s own prediction, so long as the Jiang Family Brewery does not fall, however the main house may totter, I will in the end marry into a great family, and my late father’s old friends will draw close to me for that reason—” At the thought of the day of the funeral, of the true faces of the clan uncles, that chill swept over her again despite herself. She paused before continuing, “That reason may well exist. But the human heart is hidden behind the belly; nothing can be said for certain. I am shallow of sight and narrow of learning; what I value is sentiment. The Female Scribe is learned and discerning; what she sees clearly is profit. Each has her own logic.”
Without Shen Wen, where would she be today?
“There is only one thing the Female Scribe has forgotten.”
Jiang Man lifted her head. “Had you not rescued us that day, the Jiang family’s road ahead was dark and beset with peril—where would we have stood? I dare not even think on it closely. The debts exceeded the assets, and you granted an extension on repayment; when the clan’s strong-armed power-brokers came, you sent them away and stood as my protector, settling everything and cutting off future trouble. I possessed nothing but a promising future—but without your mercy, I doubt I’d have lived to see it. If I understand this, then surely the merchants who mourned my late father and consoled us with gold and silver understand it better. How is any of that a calamity that an empty pretty shell could have averted?”
Shen Wen lowered her eyes.
Jiang Man was puzzled. She hadn’t meant to flatter, but every word was gratitude and loyalty all the same. A woman of Shen Wen’s eminence must have heard such language until she was sick of it; even if she paid it no heed, her expression shouldn’t be like this.
Her lashes became a curtain, hiding all joy and anger behind it; her lips pressed tight, so that not a trace of color showed on her face. Against her blue-black hair Shen Wen looked almost snow-pale, and she wore brocade bright as crimson; from a full zhang away, Jiang Man looked at her and thought she resembled spring snow about to melt—gleaming with an extreme cold amid the flowers.
She looked, apparently, quite unhappy.
“Your trouble is not yet cut off.” At last Shen Wen spoke.
Jiang Man hadn’t expected this. She gathered her robes. “I beg instruction.”
“Since the ones who read the times have already come calling, the dice are thrown—those are the ones who’ve bought in. The real wagering happened before that; there you’re quite right.” Shen Wen knitted her brows, thinking a moment. “That father of Jiang Lun’s…”
“My second uncle—his name is Feng.”
“Ah, Jiang Feng.” Shen Wen rubbed her temples. “Men who speak one way to people and another to ghosts are the most troublesome kind. Handle them improperly and they’ll slip through every crack. Even if I hadn’t shown myself that day, the deed to your house was in my hands; even if he took it over, he’d soon learn there was a creditor behind me. In the end things won’t go as he wishes. As for you…”
Shen Wen shot her a single glance. “Do you know why I can’t stand people who swear oaths?”
Naturally Jiang Man didn’t. “I beg the Female Scribe to teach me.”
Shen Wen said, “I hate hypotheticals.”
A flicker of sorrow crossed Shen Wen’s brow, as if her thoughts had suddenly flown beyond the sky and been forcibly recalled by their owner, like an arrow snapped mid-flight. She said, “All this talk of what might have been and wasn’t is a waste of breath. You are here, alive and well—what’s the point of idly debating ‘what if’?”
Jiang Man curtsied, her tone uncertain. “Yes.”
Shen Wen looked over. “You have more questions?”
“Yes.” Jiang Man, quietly watching her expression, still asked, “You said this trouble is not yet cut off…”
“Among officials of the same rank, those of the Presented Scholar Examination always stand a cut above. What do you suppose the reason is?”
Secrets of officialdom like this were far beyond Jiang Man. She pondered a moment and could only say, “I suppose that holding the Presented Scholar rank, promotions come faster than for others.”
“That much is true.” Shen Wen sounded weary already—or perhaps exasperated by Jiang Man’s ignorance; there was a faint fatigue in her voice. “Among those scholar-officials, two kinds draw the most contempt from their colleagues. One: those who entered through the Military Examination and switched to civil service—in the words of those pedants, they slipped in through a loophole. As for those who came up through Hereditary Privilege—ha, they’re treated as personages instead. Well, pedants always have their pedant’s logic. I can’t be bothered to listen to their fossilized nonsense; let’s grant that they can argue themselves into consistency.
“As for the second kind: petty clerks like Jiang Feng, who after Official Selection rose from Outside the Ranks into ranked office. If entering civil service through the Military Examination is a loophole, then rising from outside the ranks naturally makes one ‘mostly treacherous villains.’ Even after rising, clerks from outside remain on the service registers; barring extraordinary fortune, they rarely reach high office. Take Jiang Feng—he draws an Eighth Rank salary…” Shen Wen looked over, and only after Jiang Man nodded in confirmation did she continue, “That situation is extremely rare. I’ve seen your clan’s people; they seem to look to him as their head, do they not?”
Jiang Man answered, “Second Uncle is the most eminent figure in the Jiang clan’s history; by official rank, none in the family genealogy surpasses him. So every branch of the Jiangs, regardless of age or wealth, defers to him.”
“As if Eighth Rank were anything.” Shen Wen shook her head with a light sigh. “Those who manage to enter office are clerks of the various bureaus of the Provisional Imperial Capital, retained at their posts after selection; those who actually emerge into ranked office are vanishingly few. He now serves as magistrate of a county under Lin’an—that is what makes him dangerous. I’ve met your second uncle only once, but my standing is not something he can afford to offend. Cowed for the moment, he’ll move fast and cut through the tangle rather than drag things out and give himself room to scheme.
“But a man of mere clerk stock, now governing a locality on his own—he must have a powerful patron, and must be able to endure what ordinary men cannot. Would a schemer like that abandon his entire design because some nameless, titleless woman robbed his road?”
Shen Wen glanced at her for an instant. “I think not.”
Hearing this, Jiang Man felt a vague unease. But Shen Wen spoke all of officialdom’s affairs, whose logic she only dimly grasped; she didn’t know just what made Jiang Feng so formidable.
Still, if a woman with connections reaching heaven said so, it must be a rare and dangerous thing indeed.
“My debts will be collected. Since you made yourself the authority that day, I recognize only you. If anyone else tries to talk their way into replacing you…” Shen Wen said, “I’m afraid they won’t be able to.”
Jiang Man flinched and looked away. “Yes.”
“I’ve left people watching Jiankang; there should be movement soon. You live in Lin’an, but you are a Jiang still; some things cannot be avoided. Prepare yourself.” Shen Wen seemed not to notice, and looked back down at Jiang Man’s essay. Before long, she suddenly laughed softly—out of nothing, with a trace of mockery. “As of now, that preparation of yours really ought to be quickened.”
Before Jiang Man could even begin to digest this, Shen Wen continued, “Your faith in this doctrine of propriety and righteousness is nigh superstitious, but the essay at least holds together and carries a little sincerity—no doubt it’s what you truly think. Very well—”
“Female Scribe.” Jiang Man gathered her courage and cut her off. “I have thought it over and over; on my own I can hardly quicken anything, so I make bold to ask for instruction.”
Shen Wen narrowed her eyes and studied her a good while before saying, “Speak.”
Jiang Man pretended the thing sitting there was a mound of snow. “Today Xiaojiu has racked her brains here, but her aptitude is dull; I’ve wasted a great deal of time and still cannot guess where the contradiction lies in those three sayings of Confucius…”
Jiang Man couldn’t go on.
Shen Wen’s smile grew more and more obvious, and by that last sentence it could no longer be contained. Jiang Man swallowed her words and sank into silence—while the woman at the desk simply burst out laughing.
Jiang Man, who had been wound tight as a bowstring, froze at the sight of her.
The thin mist and heavy clouds between Shen Wen’s brows scattered all at once, leaving only a pair of eyes brimming with light.
That spark was exceedingly rare; Jiang Man had never seen it in her life. Shen Wen acted flamboyantly, wore bright silks daily and did as she pleased, yet she had never once shown this expression.
It was a sun that had no business appearing in a cold night.
“You tiptoe through every day, ready to pin the words ‘I dare not’ to your collar—and yet,” Shen Wen pressed a hand to her forehead, “ordinarily you rack your brains only to preserve yourself, but today, when you couldn’t work out the answer, you dared to beard the tiger and interrupt me?”
Jiang Man was about to say “I dare not” again, but meeting Shen Wen’s eyes, seeing the laughter in them, she couldn’t get out a single word.
In the end she could only stammer, blushing, “I spoke hastily. I beg pardon for the offense.”
“Enough, enough. I told you to speak freely—where would be the sense in going back on my word?” Shen Wen only shook her head, drank half a cup of warm water, and said slowly, “Do you know what I was testing today?”
Jiang Man paused. This whole night of rambling, unrelated questions—there had been a theme?
How could she possibly answer? She half-lowered her eyes, not meeting Shen Wen’s gaze. “I am dull-witted.”
Shen Wen looked over. “I asked about the word ‘human.’ What you answered with was nothing but ‘propriety.’ So now I ask you: does man govern the rites, or do the rites devour man?”
