Under Heaven

CHAPTER VIII

The ridiculous Kitan adoration—and that feels like the right word!—of poetry and of declaiming, drunken poets is an endless mystery to Amber, and deeply annoying. Amber is from Sardia, has honey-gold hair, therefore her name. Not particularly inventive, but courtesan names never are.

She is beautiful (green eyes!). She’s long-legged, has perfect skin, is very young. Beauty has been enough to ensure her a stream of clients since arriving here, even infatuated ones, though she can’t sing or play one of their instruments, and poetry puts her to sleep.

Not every silk merchant or off-duty officer in need of a woman for a wintry afternoon or summer night wants the girl to discourse upon philosophy, or pluck “The Bandits of the Gorge” on a pipa before he takes her upstairs and throws her across a bed.

Amber makes a point of giggling when they do this to her. Men tend to be excited by that. She may not be educated, but she understands certain things.

In bed (or on the floor beside it) she knows exactly what she’s doing, has a talent, especially if the man is young and not offensive in manner or appearance.

A few of the women who have been here longer are constantly urging her to listen more carefully to the poetry, even memorize some of it, to practise harder at her music. They are always pointing out that the men with real money, the ones who leave additional sums for the girl (they are allowed to keep half of this), will usually be those with some worldliness. That’s just the way of things here in Kitai, even in a western market town.

Bright Amber (she likes the name they gave her, as it happens) doesn’t entirely disagree, but she also knows that a merchant just off the long road will be generous to a pretty girl with smooth legs and an easy laugh and green eyes, and that many of those men will be indifferent to (or bored by, as she is) obsessive distinctions between eight-line regulated verse and any other of the hopelessly contrived forms poetry takes here.

Poetry! In the name of the bull-god! You even need to be a poet to rise in the civil service here. Can there be a clearer sign of a culture that has lost its way? Amber doesn’t think there is, when she thinks about it at all, though she does concede the point Jade Flower makes: if Kitai has lost its way, why does it control so much of the world?

Maybe it would be different in a pleasure house in Xinan or Yenling, where the aristocrats are. Maybe she’d accept that it was worth her while to work on other skills. But Amber is happy in Chenyao, has thoughts already about one or two merchants and one extremely handsome officer of the Second District cavalry.

She’s perfectly content to spend a year or two in the White Phoenix and then cajole or induce the right man to buy her as his concubine. It is as good a life plan as any for a girl.

She is from a hard world, after all. Orphaned in a plague summer, sold at twelve by her oldest sister to a brothel-keeper, noticed there by a merchant heading east, bought by him to sell. Her good fortune, that, no doubting it. She is distinctive in Kitai, and the White Phoenix is the best house in Chenyao. She has food and a bed of her own, firesides in winter, two days a month to herself, and half the festival holidays. Life has not dealt badly with her.

Chenyao is as far into Kitai as Amber feels any desire to go. They recite more poetry in pleasure houses east, among other things. She’s been told that often enough. You need to pretend to listen and admire and understand it, strum accompaniment on your pipa, or else the men in fine silks of their own will laugh the wrong way, or ignore you entirely. A waste of a pretty girl, as far as Amber is concerned.

Let the older women, who need to spend time each day painting away lines, struggle to find ways to keep the attention of clients: clapping and smiling at drunken, mumbled verses, placing a pipa strategically in front of fallen breasts. Amber tends to find that standing a certain way, then just looking across the room at a man is enough.

At this particular moment of an almost-summer night, however, in the large, subtly lit reception room of the White Phoenix, crowded with a variety of men and a number of perfumed women, circumstances are otherwise.

No one is looking at Amber, though she’s positioned herself by her favourite lamp near an archway and knows her hair is beautiful tonight.

Even one of her regular clients, the cavalry officer she has thoughts about, is among those crowding the central platform. On that platform, a soft-bellied, badly groomed, considerably intoxicated man well past his middle years is reciting a verse about—as best Amber can tell—a wife and her absent husband.

It is, she feels strongly, insulting.

The poet is proceeding slowly—in part, because he stops to take a drink every few lines. This poem is not (alas!) one of their brief, formal things. This one, he declared (his voice is not deep but it carries), is a ballad, whatever that is.

Well, Amber knows one cursed thing it is: long.

She makes herself smile with that. No one notices. One of the other girls, looking as if she was on the cresting edge of extreme desire, had breathed the word immortal when the poet came in some little time ago.

The Banished Immortal.

It is laughable. Amber wants to laugh but knows she’d be in trouble if she did. Where she comes from, an immortal, exiled from heaven for whatever reason, would have to look a great deal more as if he knew how to use the sword that lies beside the poet now, and would surely have the dignity to not be so obviously unable to stop himself from drinking cup after cup of their best grape wine.

It hasn’t happened yet, but she expects his voice to start slurring soon—if he even manages to remain upright. This one isn’t going to be much use to himself or the girl he takes upstairs, Amber thinks. Sometimes, if the man is too drunk to use you properly he leaves a larger sum, to have a girl keep quiet about his embarrassment.

She doesn’t think this one, this immortal in his dusty, wine-stained clothing, is likely to care.

He is still reciting to an unnaturally silent room, and still drinking another cup every few lines. He’s impressive in that, at least, Amber concedes. Two of the girls, hovering by the platform, visibly excited, hasten to refill his cup, taking turns. Amber wonders if their nipples are hard. She is tempted to have a coughing fit or cause a lamp to topple, so annoyed is she by this spectacle. No one is looking at her, no one is talking or even whispering to anyone else, no one is taking any of the women to another room, and the owner doesn’t look as if she cares in the least.

Incredulously, Amber realizes that some of the girls—and many of the men—have tears in their eyes. Tears! Bright Amber is from a land famed for horses and women, and for men who fight bare-chested with knives, priding themselves on their scars.

She is seventeen and a half years old, has been in the White Phoenix for a little more than two years now. But honestly, she thinks, she could live among these Kitan till she was dried up like an end-of-autumn grape, bent like an ox-cart wheel, and she’d never understand them, or how the Celestial Empire dominates the world they know.

She is thinking this, outraged and aggrieved, when another man steps quietly into the room, following Lotus through the open doorway. Lotus just watches at the entrance now, greets arrivals, too old to ever be asked to go to a room with a man any more. Her hands are twisted, painful in rain and wind, she can’t even play the pipa properly. Apparently she was the best of all of them, once.

Amber sees Lotus bow to this man, as low as she can, twice, as she backs out to the portico. That—of course—is the usual sign to all of them: this one is important, has money.

No one but Amber is even looking.

She runs a quick hand to her bright hair, checking the pins that hold it in place. Prepares her smile for when his gaze finds her beside the lamp.