“Your dead mother put it into my mind to come to you,” old Liu Ma now said. “I felt her ghost stirring the bed curtains for two nights and I knew it was she because I smelled the cassia flowers she used always to wear in her hair.”
“My father still loves cassia flowers,” Mayli said. One reason why she had wanted the old woman near her was that she might hear these small stories about the mother who had died when she was born.
“Do you think you can tell me anything I do not already know?” the woman said. “What happened to your mother happened to me. I have forgotten nothing. Now come and eat.”
She seized Mayli’s hand in her dry old hand and pulled her toward the door into the main room of the house where Mayli lived alone with this one old woman. “Sit down,” she commanded and when Mayli had sat down she brought a brass bowl of hot water and a small white towel for hand washing. And while she did this she grumbled steadfastly.
“I will throw the pork to the street dogs,” she said. “It is dog’s food, anyway. But that great turnip of a soldier who you say is your foster brother — though it is only in days like these when all reason has gone from the minds of the people that a young girl has a foster brother! A brother or nothing — what is a foster brother but a man, and what have you to do with a man who is not your brother? It spoils the name of this house to see a tall soldier stoop his head to enter the gate. I lie for you, but can lies deny that he is here when any one on the street can see him come in? That hag in the hot water shop next door, she says, ‘I see your master is home again.’ And how can I say he is not the master here, when she sees him come into our gate?”
To such talk which the old woman poured out all day like water from a dripping fountain, Mayli said nothing. She smiled, smoothed her black hair with her long pale hand, sat down at the table in the main room of the house and ate heartily of the lamb’s meat and rice and cabbage on the table, while the old woman hovered about her, keeping her tea hot and watching her while she ate and always talking.
Now suddenly Mayli broke across that talk with a sharp look of mischief. She had eaten well but she did not put down her chopsticks.
“Where is that pork, Liu Ma?” she asked.
“It is in the kitchen waiting for me to throw it to the dogs,” the old woman said.
“Give it to me,” Mayli said, “I am still hungry.”
Liu Ma opened her old eyes and thrust out her under lip. “I will not give it to you, and you know it, you wicked one,” she said loudly. “I will let you starve before with my own hands I give you so vile a meat.”
“But if Sheng had stayed to eat with me as he often does, I would have eaten the pork,” Mayli said.
“I always know my place,” Liu Ma declared. “Of course then I would only wait to scold you in private.”
“Oh, you old fool,” Mayli said, still laughing. And she rose and swept past the old woman and into the kitchen and there on the edge of the earthen stove was the bowl of pork, very hot and fragrant, with chestnuts cooked in it. “It does not look like a dish ready to throw to a dog,” Mayli said, her black eyes still bright with mischief. “It looks like a dish an old woman puts aside for her own dinner.”
“Oh, how I wish your mother had lived!” Liu Ma groaned. “Had she lived she would have beaten you with a bamboo and made you into a decent maid! But your father was always a man as soft as smoke. Yes, he never made a shape for himself in anything. It was she who would have beaten you.”
By now Mayli had the dish on the table and she dipped into it with her chopsticks and brought out the best bits of sweet pork, crusted with delicately brown fat and tender parboiled skin.
“How well you do cook pork when it is a dish you never even taste,” she said to the old woman.
She looked at Liu Ma and suddenly Liu Ma’s brown face crinkled. “You young accursed!” she said laughing. “If you were not so much taller than I am, I would smack the palm of my hand across your bottom. I am glad that dragon’s son whom you call your foster brother is bigger than you. When he loses his temper with you after you are married I will not beg him to stay his hand. I will call out to him, ‘Beat her another blow, beat her another one for me!’ ”
“You old bone,” Mayli said gaily. “How do you know I will marry him when I do not know myself whether or not I will?”
… At this moment Sheng stood at attention before his General. This General was a man of the southwest, a man still young and hearty, who was in command of the armies of this region. He had a notable story of his own, being sometimes a rebel but now a loyal soldier against the common enemy. For in times of peace men will fight for this or that small cause, but when an enemy from outside the nation comes down upon all alike, then no man may fight for his own cause, and so this General had brought all his soldiers behind him and he had gone to the One Above and given himself and his men to the common war.
When he saw Sheng stand at attention before him he made a motion to him. “Sit down,” he said. “I have something to say to you, not as your superior but as a man to another man. I have had an order from the One Above that our two best divisions are to march into Burma. It is against my will and I cannot obey the One Above and put my command on you without letting you know that I do not approve the thing I am compelled to command you. Sit down — sit down!”
At this Sheng sat down, but he took off his cap and held it and he sat down on the edge of his chair so as not to show himself at ease before his superior. He kept silent, too, and waited, so that he might prove his respect. There were two guards in the room, standing like idols against the wall. To these the General lifted his eyelids and they went out. So the two of them were alone. The General leaned back in the wooden chair in which he sat and played with a small clay buffalo that was on his desk.
“Your father is a farmer, you told me once,” he said to Sheng.
“I am the son of the son of farmers for a thousand years,” Sheng replied.
“Are you your father’s only son?” the General asked.
“I am the youngest of three,” Sheng replied. “And all are living.”
The General sighed. “Then I may send you out to an unlucky war without cutting off your father’s life.”
“My father’s life is not in me,” Sheng replied. “He has my two brothers and they have sons.”
“And you, are you wed?” the General asked.
“No, and not likely to be,” Sheng said bitterly.
The General smiled at this. “You are young to say that,” he said.
But Sheng did not answer this for a moment. Then he said, “It is as well for one who is about to be sent into battle not to have a wife. At least I go alone and free.”
“You are right,” the General said. He put down the clay toy in his hand and picked up a brush. “Where is your father’s house and what is his name? I shall write him myself if you do not come back from this battle.”
“Ling Tan of the village of Ling, to the south of the city of Nanking, in the province of Kiangsu,” Sheng said.
The General dropped his brush. “But that is land held by the enemy,” he said.
“Do I not know that?” Sheng replied. “They came in and burned and they ravaged and they murdered wherever they could. I fought there together with the hillmen and we killed the enemy by the handsful, and then I came out because a handful now and again was not enough for the thirst in me for their blood. I shall be thirsty until I can kill them by the hundreds and the thousands. So I came out and I have spent the months learning until the battle of Long Sands.”
“That tells me why you have learned so well,” the General replied.
When he had brushed quickly the name of Ling Tan and where he lived he put down the brush and put his hands on the sides of his chair and fixed his eyes upon Sheng’s face.