“Mr. Jiang!” He heard it this time. “Jiang Shi-Rong! Wait!”
He turned his head. A single rider was urging his horse along the road. After the glare of the red sun in his eyes, it took Jiang a moment to see that it was Mr. Wen’s servant, Wong. What could that mean? He reined in his horse.
Wong—a small, plump, bald man who had originally come from the south—ran the house for the aging scholar, who trusted him completely, and he’d taken young Jiang under his wing as soon as he’d come to stay there. He was perspiring. He must have been riding like an imperial messenger to catch me, the young man thought.
“Is Mr. Wen all right?” Jiang asked anxiously.
“Yes, yes. He says you must return to Beijing at once.”
“Return?” Jiang looked at him in dismay. “But my father’s dying. I have to go to him.”
“You have heard of the lord Lin?”
“Of course.” All Beijing had been talking about the modest official, little known before, who had so impressed the emperor that he had been given a mission of great importance.
“He wants to see you. Right away.”
“Me?” He was a nobody. Not even that. An insignificant failure.
“Mr. Wen wrote to the lord Lin about you. He knows the lord Lin from when they were students. But Mr. Wen did not tell you, did not want to raise your hopes. When the lord Lin did not reply…” He made a sad face. “Then this morning, after you left, Mr. Wen received a message. Maybe the lord Lin will take you on his staff. But he needs to see you first. So Mr. Wen tells me to ride like a thousand devils to get you back.” He looked at the young man intently. “This is a big chance for you, Jiang Shi-Rong,” he said quietly. “If the lord Lin is successful in his mission, and you please him, the emperor himself will hear your name. You will be on the path to fortune again. I am happy for you.” He made a little bow to indicate the young man’s future status.
“But my father…”
“He may be dead already. You do not know.”
“And he may be alive.” As the young man looked away, his face was a picture of distress. “I should have gone before,” he muttered to himself. “I was too ashamed.” He turned to Wong again. “If I go back now, it will cost me three days. Maybe more.”
“If you want to succeed, you must take chances. Mr. Wen says your father would certainly want you to see the lord Lin.” The messenger paused. “Mr. Wen told the lord Lin that you speak Cantonese. Big point in your favor—for this mission.”
Shi-Rong said nothing. They both knew it was thanks to Wong that he could speak the servant’s Cantonese dialect. At first it had amused the young mandarin to pick up some everyday expressions from Wong. He’d soon discovered that Cantonese was almost like another language. It also used more tones than Mandarin. But he had a good ear, and over a year or two, chatting to Wong every day, he’d begun to speak enough to get by. His father, who had a low opinion of the people of the south, had been ironically amused when he heard about this achievement. “Though I suppose it could be useful, one day,” he allowed. But Mr. Wen counseled him, “Don’t despise the Cantonese language, young man. It contains many ancient words that have since been lost in the Mandarin we speak.”
Wong was looking at him urgently. “Mr. Wen says you may never get a chance like this again,” he continued.
Jiang Shi-Rong gazed towards the red sun and shook his head miserably.
“I know that,” he said quietly.
For a minute neither of them moved. Then, with a heavy heart, the young man silently began to ride his horse along the road, back to Beijing.
◦
By the end of that night, five hundred miles away, in the coastal lands west of the port then known to the outside world as Canton, a mist had drifted in from the South China Sea, shrouding the world in whiteness.
The girl went to the courtyard gate and looked out, thinking herself alone.
Despite the dawn mist, she could sense the presence of the sun, shining somewhere behind the haze; but she still couldn’t see the edge of the pond, just thirty paces in front of her, nor the rickety wooden bridge upon which her father-in-law, Mr. Lung, liked to watch the full moon and remind himself that he owned the pond and that he was the richest peasant in the hamlet.
She listened in the damp silence. Sometimes one might hear a soft splash as a duck stuck its head in the water and then shook it. But she heard nothing.
“Mei-Ling.” A hiss from somewhere to her right.
She frowned. She could just make out the shape of the bamboo clump that stood beside the path. Cautiously she took a step towards it.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s me. Nio.” A figure appeared beside the bamboo and came towards her.
“Little Brother!” Her face lit up. Even after the years of absence, there could be no mistaking him. He still bore the telltale scar across his nose and cheek.
Nio wasn’t exactly her brother. Hardly a relation at all, one might say. He came from her grandmother’s family, on her mother’s side, who belonged to the Hakka tribe. After his mother and sisters died in a plague, his father had left him with Mei-Ling’s parents for two years before he’d married again and taken the boy back.
His name was Niu, properly speaking. But in the dialect of his native village, it sounded more like Nyok, though one could hardly hear the final k. So Mei-Ling had compromised and invented the name Nio, with a short o, and so he’d remained ever since.
Long before his father had taken him back, Mei-Ling had adopted Nio as a brother, and she’d been his big sister ever since.
“When did you arrive?” she whispered.
“Two days
