What is he doing here? He had been in Pan with the regent during the coronation, and he remembered seeing the striking figure of this man standing next to Prime Minister Cogo Yelu and Queen Gin.
He jumped up as though springs had been installed under his bottom. “Er, Grand Sec—er—Imperial Sch—er—” The man is supposed to have refused all titles. How am I supposed to address him?
“The name is Toru Noki,” the man said, smiling. “I have no titles.”
The clerk nodded and bowed repeatedly like a shadow puppet whose tangled strings were being jerked by the puppeteer in an attempt at freeing them. He must have very good reasons for disguising his identity. I’d better not blow his cover.
The girl set the bag on her shoulder down on the ground. “Toru, would you help me loosen the string on the sack? My fingers are a bit numb from holding on to it.”
The clerk watched in disbelief as one of the closest advisers of the Emperor of Dara squatted down like a common peasant to untie the string on the grain sack.
This girl must be very, very important. The clerk turned the thought over in his head and knew what he had to do.
He barely glanced at the grain. “Excellent quality! We’ll buy everything you have. How about twenty per bushel?”
“Twenty?” Mimi sounded amazed.
“Er… how about forty then?”
“Forty?” She sounded even more shocked.
The clerk looked at “Toru Noki” helplessly. This is already four times the going rate in the market! He gritted his teeth. If the regent complained later, he’d just have to explain the situation the best he could.
“Eighty then. But that’s really as high as I can go. Really. Please?”
The girl seemed in a daze as she signed the contract by drawing a circle on the paper with the inked brush.
“We’ll send over the shipping carts in two days,” the clerk said.
“Thank you,” said Mimi.
“Thank you,” said Toru Noki, smiling.
“Good negotiation,” said Toru.
“That wasn’t a negotiation at all,” said Mimi. “Just who are you? That clerk acted like a mouse who had seen a cat.”
“I really am just a wanderer these days,” said Toru. “I’m not lying when I tell you I don’t have a title.”
“That doesn’t mean you aren’t important.”
“Sometimes knowledge can get in the way of a friendship,” said Toru, his tone serious. “I like how we can converse now as equals. I don’t want to lose that.”
“All right.” Mimi nodded reluctantly. Then she brightened. “It’s noon! We should take our second measurement.”
She planted her walking stick into the ground and took out the mirror and the banana leaf and set up the contraption as she had before. The two looked at the image of the noonday sun projected onto the banana leaf. It matched exactly the outline she had traced in the morning.
“As I suspected,” declared Mimi triumphantly. “The sun is exactly the same size at sunrise and at noon. It only looks bigger when it’s near the horizon but actually isn’t.”
“Well done,” said Toru. “It is just as you said: Always weigh the fish. I’ve always believed that the universe is knowable, but your phrasing cuts to the heart of the matter.”
But Mimi felt disappointed. “Their debate sounded so interesting, though. I almost wish the sun did change in size.”
“You can’t build an elaborate house on a bad foundation,” said Toru. “If the basis for their dispute turned out to be illusory, it doesn’t matter how good their reasoning was. There is wisdom in the words of the sages, but one must keep in mind that they didn’t know everything. Models can be helpful in understanding the world, but models must be refined by testing against observation. You have to both experience reality and construct it.”
Mimi pondered Toru’s words. Somehow the veil over the world seemed to have grown slightly more transparent.
Is the world but a model for the ideal in the minds of the gods? Or is the world something beyond the reach of all models, in the same way that what I feel when I gaze at nature cannot be expressed in words?
“That sounds smarter than what both of those toko dawiji said.”
“I can’t take credit for that. It’s a quote from Na Moji, founder of the Patternist school of thinking. I suppose I’m more of a Patternist than anything else, but I think all the Hundred Schools have some wisdom to teach us. They are like different tools for shaping and understanding reality, and a talented craftsman can gain insight into the world and remake it with their aid. I think you have Patternist instincts too, and you have much raw talent. But you have to cultivate it.”
Talent, Mimi thought. The words of her mother came unbidden to mind. Talent is like a pretty feather in the tail of a peacock, daughter. It brings joy to the powerful but only sorrow to the bird.
“What do talent and wisdom have to do with the daughter of a poor peasant?” she asked. “The poor have one path in this world, and the powerful another.”
“Don’t you know the story of Queen Gin? She began as a street urchin, child, and yet she became the greatest tactician in all of Dara by cultivating her talent.”
“That was a time of war, of chaos. Now the world is at peace.”
“There are talents useful in war, and talents useful in peace. I do not know all there is to know about the gods, but I do believe it is not their will that a great pearl lie in obscurity, unable to shine.”
What’s it like to have so many tools of the mind at your disposal that you could dissect reality and put it back together as skillfully as my mother can scale and gut a fish within minutes and turn it into a delicious dinner?
Mimi had never envied the children of the wealthy who went to school and learned to read and write, but now she felt a keen hunger whose intensity was painful. She had been given a taste of the wider world out there, a glimpse of the Truth beneath the surface, a hint of the meaning of the speech of the gods. She wanted more. So much more.
Could not such knowledge be turned into silk clothes and white rice? Into servants and carriages and clinking coins that would relieve my mother and me from toil? Into arrogant looks and proud gazes directed at the road ahead instead of at the thronging poor to the sides?
Abruptly, she turned and knelt before Toru and touched her forehead to the ground.
“Will you teach me, Toru-ji? Will you help me cultivate my talent?”
But Toru stepped to the side, avoiding accepting her prostration. Mimi’s heart sank. She looked up, her eyes narrowed. “What happened to that talk about a pearl not lying in obscurity? Are you too timid to dive into the dark sea to retrieve it?”
Toru laughed lightly, but there was a hint of sorrow and bitterness in it. “You have a fiery spirit, and that is a good thing. But you’re also impatient and cannot hold your tongue, which is not always a good thing.”
Mimi’s face flushed. “I thought you were interested in the truth.”
“It is not enough to sharpen a brilliant mind,” Toru said. His eyes seemed to be focusing on something far in the distance, in time or space. “The road you ask me to lead you on is winding and rugged, and it requires knowing when to delay the truth and how to craft it so that it is more pleasing to powerful ears. These are not skills I possess in abundance either. I can enlarge your vision and show you how to pick out the patterns hidden all around you, but there are patterns, patterns of power, that I cannot teach you to read.”