Later that day he and Bold were assigned to one of Shen's pleasure boats, which were floating extensions of his restaurant. 'We have a wonderful feast for our passengers today,' Shen cried as they arrived and filed aboard. 'We'll be serving the Eight Dainties today dragon livers, phoenix marrow, bear paws, lips of apes, rabbit embryo, carp tail, broiled osprey, and kumiss.'
Bold smiled to think of kumiss, which was simply fermented mares' milk, included among the Eight Dainties; he had practically grown up on it. 'Some of those are easier to obtain than others,' he said, and Shen laughed and kicked him into the boat.
Onto the lake they paddled. 'How come your lips are still on your face?' Kyu called back at Shen, who was out of hearing.
Bold laughed. 'The Eight Dainties,' he said. 'What these people think of!'
'They do love their numbers,' Kyu agreed. 'The Three Pure Ones, the Four Emperors, the Nine Luminaries 'The Twenty eight Constellations '
'The Twelve Horary Branches, the Five Elders of the Five Regions..
'The Fifty Star Spirits.'
'The Ten Unforgivable Sins.'
'The Six Bad Recipes.'
Kyu cackled briefly. 'It's not numbers they like, it's lists. Lists of all the things they have.'
Out on the lake Bold and Kyu saw up close the magnificent decoration of the day's dragon boats, bedecked with flowers, feathers, coloured flags and spinners. Musicians on each boat played madly, trying with drum and horn to drown out the sound of all the others, while pikemen in the bows reached out with padded staves to knock people on other boats into the water.
In the midst of this happy tumult, screams of a different tone caught the attention of those on the water, and they looked ashore and saw that there was a fire. Instantly the games ended and all the boats made a beeline for land, piling up five deep against the docks. People ran right over the boats in their haste, some towards the fire, some towards their own neighbourhoods. As they hurried over to the restaurant Bold and Kyu saw for the first time a fire brigade. Each neighbourhood had one, with its own equipment, and they would all follow the signal flags from the watchtowers around the city, soaking roofs in districts threatened by the blaze, or putting out flying embers. Hangzhou's buildings were all wood or bamboo, and most districts had gone up in flames at one time or another, so the routine was well practised. Bold and Kyu ran behind Shen up to the burning neighbourhood, which was to the north of theirs and upwind, so that they too were in danger.
At the fire's edge thousands of men and women were at work, many in bucket lines that extended to the nearest canals. The buckets were run upstairs into smoky buildings, and tossed down onto the flames. There were also quite a number of men carrying staves, pikes, and even crossbows, and questioning men hauled out of the fiery alleyways bordering the conflagration. Suddenly these men beat one of those that emerged to a bloody mass, right there amid the firefighting. Looter, someone said. Army detachments would soon arrive to help capture more and kill them on the spot, after public torture, if there was time.
Despite this threat, Bold saw now that there were figures without buckets, darting in and out of the burning buildings. The fight against looters was as intense as that against the fire! Kyu too saw this as he passed wooden or bamboo buckets down the line, openly watching everything.
Days flew by, each busier than the last. Kyu was still nearly mute, head always lowered, a mere beast of burden or kitchen swab incapable of learning Chinese, or so everyone in the restaurant believed. Only semihuman in fact, which was the usual attitude of the Chinese towards black slaves in the city.
Bold spent more and more time working for I li. She appeared to prefer to take him on her trips out, and he hustled to keep up with her, manoeuvring the wheelbarrow through the crowd. She was always in a tearing hurry, mostly in her quest for new foods; she seemed anxious to try everything. Bold saw that the restaurant's success had resulted from her efforts. Shen himself was more an impediment than a help, as he was bad with his abacus and couldn't remember much, especially about his debts, and he kicked his slaves and his girls for hire.
So Bold was pleased to follow I Ii They visited Mother Sung's outside the Cash — reserve Gate, to try her white soy soup. They watched Wei Big Knife at the Cat Bridge boil pork, and Chou Number Five in front of the Five span Pavilion, making his honey fritters. Back in the kitchen I Ii would try to reproduce these foods exactly, shaking her head ominously as she did. Sometimes she would retire to her room to think, and a few times she called Bold up the stairs, to order him out in search of some spice or ingredient she had thought of that might help with a dish.
Her room had a table by the bed, covered with cosmetic bottles, jewellery, perfume sachets, mirrors and little boxes of lacquered wood, jade, gold and silver. Gifts from Shen, apparently. Bold glanced at them while she sat there thinking.
A tub of white foundation powder, Still flat and shiny on top.
A deep rose shade of grease blush,
For cheeks already chapped dark red. A box of pink balsam leaves Crushed in alum, for tinted nails,
Which many women in the restaurant displayed. I Ii's nails were bitten to the quick.
Cosmetics never used, jewellery never worn,
Mirrors never looked into. The outward gaze.
Once she stained her palms with the pink balsam dye; another time, all the dogs and cats in the kitchen. Just to see what would happen, as far as Bold could tell.
But she was interested in the things of the city. Half her trips out were occupied by talk, by asking questions. Once she came home troubled: 'Bold, they say that northerners here go to restaurants that serve human flesh. "Two legged mutton", have you heard that? Different names for old men, women, young girls, children? Are they really such monsters up there?'
'I don't think so,' Bold said. 'I never met any.'
She was not entirely reassured. She often saw hungry ghosts in her sleep, and they had to come from somewhere. And they sometimes complained to her of having had their bodies eaten. It made sense to her that they might cluster around restaurants in search of some kind of retribution. Bold nodded; it made sense to him too, though it was hard to believe the teeming city harboured practising cannibals when there was so much other food to be had.
As the restaurant prospered, I Ii made Shen improve the place, cutting holes in the side walls and putting in windows, filling them with square trellis works supporting oiled paper, which blazed or glowed with sunlight, depending on the hour and weather. She opened the front of the building entirely to the lakefront promenade, and paved the downstairs with glazed bricks. She burned pots of mosquito smoke during the summer, when they were at their worst. She built in a number of small wall shrines devoted to various gods deities of place, animal spirits, demons and hungry ghosts, even, at Bold's humble request, one to Tianfei the Celestial Consort, despite her suspicion that this was only another name for Tara, already much honoured in the nooks and crannies of the house. If it annoyed Tara, she said, it would be on Bold's head.
Once she came home retailing a story of a number of people who had died and come back to life shortly thereafter, apparently because of the mistakes of careless celestial scribes, who had written down the wrong names. Bold smiled; the Chinese imagined a complicated bureaucracy for the dead, just like the ones they had established for everything else. 'They came back with information for their living relatives, things that turned out to be correct even though the briefly deceased person couldn't have known about it!'
'Marvels,' Bold said.
'Marvels happen every day,' I li replied. It was, as far as she was concerned, a universe peopled by spirits, genies, demons, ghosts as many kinds of beings as tastes. She had never had the bardo explained to her, and so she didn't understand the six levels of reality that organized cosmic existence; and Bold did not feel that he was in a position to teach her. So it remained at the level of ghosts and demons. Malignant ones could be held off by various practices that annoyed them; firecrackers, drums and gongs, these things chased them away. It was also possible to strike them with a stick, or burn artemisia, a Sechuan custom that I Li practised. She also bought magic writing on miniature papers or cylinders of silver, and put up white jade square tiles in every doorway; dark demons disliked the light of these. And the restaurant and its household prospered, so she felt she had done the right things.