The Buddhist changed his face, but only a very little. “I haven’t,” he said levelly. “But I pass only rarely outside these poor walls. Most of my work is done within.”
The magistrate focused upon the man sitting coldly before him and felt that he was looking at dead wood. “I have no real power here in Wei, but it grieves me deeply to see a harmless man and a good one struck down as he went about what he believed to be his sacred duty.”
The Buddhist opened his hands helplessly toward the ceiling. “Life and death are grave matters, are they not? And the second follows the first as swiftly as nightfall.” He smiled placidly. “What’s a man to do?”
“You yourself knew Mr. Keng, of course.”
“Of course. What two men can live so close to one another and not meet? They might see each other, one might be stopped walking by the other, they might fall to talking together—”
“And when you talked together, Mr. Liu, were you of one mind or two?”
Strangely, the magistrate was having trouble keeping the form of the Buddhist clearly present before him. The man was calm and self-possessed enough, tranquil as glass, but there was an added resonance in him that seemed to unsettle the balance of the entire room. It was almost as if he were somehow sitting behind himself and smiling, laughing in secret at the magistrate’s clumsy efforts to make him declare himself and confess. “We screamed at one another lustily and to no effect, each trying to awaken the mind of the other to some kind of sense. The devotees of Master K’ung, you know,” he added patiently, “are often victims of their own bothersome, excessive activities.”
Glancing neutrally about the drab room, Magistrate Ti asked, “And which school do you follow yourself, Mr. Liu?”
The Buddhist dropped one hand to the floor and rested his fingertips upon it. “I studied for many years at Mount Shuang-feng, first with Master Tao-hsin and then with Master Hung-jen. The one taught me how to sit long and say nothing and the other taught me how to think and read the Chin-kang ching, the Diamond Scripture.”
“Did neither of them teach you how to beg?”
This was the question that finally moved the straight-backed man, who had been sitting on the edge of everything, to sigh audibly with satisfaction.
“Beg, did you say?” The Buddhist looked about him and frowned. “Well, I do sometimes, but only when the need is very keen.”
“And the first thing you must need,” Ti pressed gently, “is some kind of bowl for your alms.” He raised his eyebrows at the naked room. “Has something become of yours, might I ask?”
The three men sat silent for a moment. A bustle of movement echoed distantly from the park.
Plainly worried now, the Buddhist said: “I don’t know what you mean to say, but there’s been no one here since this morning. And that was only when the woman came to take my robes to clean.”
“You must have carried it out yourself, then?”
“When I went where?”
“You must have moved outside at least once today,” the magistrate said.
“Motion does not move,” Liu Ch’a intoned profoundly. “You can see for yourself,” he said, gesturing toward the frayed screen, “that my sandals are free from dust.”
To everyone’s surprise, Magistrate Ti rose and stepped over to the screen. There he found a single pair of homemade sandals, unevenly and grotesquely carved from flat blocks of wood. Ti picked them up and turned them over. Their bottoms were knotted and scarred and strangely shaped, almost as if the scuffed marks of them across shallow dust would mimic the shuffle of a bare foot. Swaying uncertainly where he stood, the magistrate could not decide if what he had seen on the path had been the prints of feet or the prints of sandals fashioned to look like feet — or perhaps neither. He grumbled in frustration. Then he looked again at the soles of the sandals and saw on one of them part of a killed insect, shining and blue, stuck by its own blood to the wood. He set the sandals down, wiping their dust from his hands.
“It’s not good for any man,” he said softly to the Buddhist, “to spend too much of his time out of the sun’s light.”
“The external world has nothing to do with me, nor I with it,” Liu answered peacefully, though his face was creased “Have you never noticed, Magistrate Ti, that the real sky is never revealed until all the birds have flown out of sight?”
As the magistrate lowered himself to the mat again, the doorway trembled with the shadow of a young woman entering behind an armful of sodden clothes. She was dark and small, lovely as rich wood, and the first appearance of her face was of eager happiness. When she saw the magistrate and the neighbor seated in front of Liu Ch’a, the joy left her face and she almost let the clothes drop.
“Just go about what you need to do, Miss Li,” the Buddhist said kindly. “Don’t mind us.”
She began to wander numbly toward the screen when Ti stopped her. “Whereabouts did you wash this man’s clothes today, girl?”
“In the ditch, sir, where I always do.”
“And does that lie in the direction of the park?”
“The opposite,” the straight-sitting man put in.
The girl nodded.
“And where do you live yourself?” the magistrate went on.
“On the — on the other side of the park.”
Ti stared at her for a time, at her dark hand feebly stroking the Buddhist’s robes as if they were sleeping children. Then he waved at the man of the house. “You must have come here early this morning. Did you see this man then?”
“He was still sleeping,” she said.
“Was that before or after he left the house?”
The Buddhist started to say something, but Magistrate Ti shut his mouth with a glance.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” the girl wavered. “Mr. Liu didn’t go out this morning. He never goes out.”
“But did you actually see him sleeping this morning?”
“Well—” She looked at her master, then away. “He always leaves his robes for me at the door. The room was dark. I thought I could hear him breathing.”
“But tell me,” the magistrate insisted, “did you really see him?”
The girl looked uncomfortably at her bare feet and hesitated. She seemed so young and confused that anyone watching her must have thought her next words would sound fragile in the hollow room. Yet when she did reply, her voice was thin and polished as a sword-blade, colder than stone.
“No.”
Her saying it changed everything all at once, and the raw chill of it darkened the corners of the room. The magistrate could feel the subtle shifting of the moral weight surrounding him. The girl had done what she could. She had tried her best to protect her master, but she had been unable to brazen it out to the end, and now she stared at the Buddhist as if he were far away.
Ti said: “And can you tell me, Miss Li, precisely how long you have been in love with Mr. Liu here?”
The man of the house shouted and began to stand, but it was on the girl that the magistrate kept his attention. She should have wilted delicately in a curling of shame, or at the very least protested in virtuous anger at the suggestion, but instead she stood still as ice and looked at the Buddhist with an iron hatred.
“When a young woman gives her heart away,” the magistrate said, “she seldom chooses as well as she should. She chooses the merchant instead of the hardy farmer, the craftsman instead of the respected teacher. She follows visions of romance that have nothing to do with what is proper for her, what is expected of her. And sometimes she gives her love in secret, to one who could never return it.”
The standing girl, still holding the wet robes, and the again seated man tried to look at each other without looking, two children who had been planning a forbidden game together. Magistrate Ti watched them, and when he continued he gradually concentrated more upon the girl, and his voice grew harder.