If she wants to build a city of the pearl in Shin, why can’t she just buy the material from here?
It must have something to do with the nature of the pearl.
I suddenly realize my mistake.
I haven’t been paying attention to architecture class. If I want to understand why the Empress Dowager’s putting Cricket and me in this position, I need to understand more about the pearl.
And architecture is all about the pearl.
At the same time, Cricket and I can’t look too interested in the pearl. That’ll seem to confirm Suki’s accusation that we’re Shinian spies.
The problem is that Supreme Sensei Master Jio never teaches us anything about what the pearl really is in architecture class.
“Sweet embryos, you are little. But how little? Are you excellently little? Please each take one of these.” He presents a lacquered tray filled with little cones with a sharp pick at the end. “Place one on the smallest finger of your hand. You will use it to unravel a silkworm cocoon to see who can extract the longest unbroken thread. Twelve years ago, a student produced one that was so long, it would take half an hour to skate its length, ahihahaha!”
When I make the first incision into my cocoon with the pick, I push too deep and it pierces into the flesh of the silkworm inside. Thick fluid leaks all over my cocoon, ruining it. Make me drink sand to death.
After that, Supreme Sensei makes us stretch up an arm, hold by its top tip a brush that’s as long as our arms, and write our name on the nail of the long finger of the other hand. I’m holding the brush as still as I can, but the bristles are lurching back and forth with the trembling of my fingers, like they’re trying to smear ink all over half my hand. Which is exactly what they do as soon as I try to touch the brush to the nail. Why are we doing these ludicrous exercises?
Finally, we’re each made to place a small ring on the back of our hand and count the pores in the skin within the ring. I count twelve pores. I recount them to make sure my eyes are seeing correctly. The second time, I count five. Ten thousand years of stomach gas.
This is useless. It isn’t teaching me anything about the secret of the pearl. I wish I could just openly ask Supreme Sensei or a fellow student, but I can’t do anything that appears to confirm Suki’s accusation that I’m after the secret of the pearl.
My hopes rise when Supreme Sensei announces that there will be two additions to the first-years’ architecture course of study. However, they both turn out to be useless.
First, he announces that there will be an optional sculpture competition. The entrants choose a structure on the campus of Pearl Famous to carve in miniature out of a block of ivory wood, which comes from the dried trunks of the giant kelp trees in the sea around Pearl. The students who carve the three best sculptures will help the third-year students create the set for the Drift Season Pageant at the end of the year. I, of course, am not going to participate. Useless.
Second, there’s a new thing that happens in architecture class. A horrid new thing. Sessions with Chingu, the oracular monkey.
Supreme Sensei Master Jio takes us to the edge of the great square on the north side of the Principal Island, Divinity’s Lap. We line up facing the water, next to a sculpture of the Enlightened One. An old man is waiting for us there. He’s holding a monkey holding a cleaver. Supreme Sensei Master Jio laughs, calls us sweet embryos, recites words that add up to a string of gibberish, and leaves us with the old man and the monkey and the cleaver.
Mole Girl is nearby, and I ask her who the old man is.
“That’s Sagacious Monk Goom, who serves as spiritual guide for Pearl Famous.”
“Why does he have a monkey?”
“That’s his legendarily ill-tempered monkey, Chingu!”
Honking Girl hears us and says, “I heard that Sagacious Monk Goom achieved enough spiritual advancement to receive enlightenment from the gods and become a great sorcerer. He went up to the mountaintop with his beloved yet hideously spoiled pet monkey, Chingu. The bolt of enlightenment missed the monk and hit the monkey instead. The heavenly ether went into her and she was made into a great sorcerer with awesome powers but none of the self-restraint of a human.”
I turn away from this silly girl. Does she really think I’m stupid enough ever to believe anything she says again? However, Mole Girl sees my sneer and says, “No, it’s true! She’s an oracular monkey. If you manage to grab one of her hands, she’ll fall into a trance and select three tiles from a set of sixty-lucky, each with a different logogram. The three logograms together hold your fortune.”
“That sounds useful,” I say.
“Yes,” says Mole Girl. “But the problem is the cleaver. Chingu got hold of a cleaver twenty years ago, and no one has been able to get it away from her since. And if you think that there’s anything more terrifying under heaven than an irritable monkey with a cleaver, you haven’t met Chingu.”
“Is that why everyone says ‘failed to keep the monkey pleased’ when they mean ‘made a horrible, horrible mistake’?”
“Yes! If you irritate her, Chingu will try to chop something off of you and give you a bad oracle, which always proves to be true.”
I suppose no one has been able to bathe her in twenty years, either. She looks as tangled and smeared as something you’d mop the toilet-room floor with. I watch her grab the ornate pearlsilk cap covered with stars and moons from her head, scrub
