It didn’t escape her that her own people, not too many generations before, had counted as barbarians. It was primarily to make a point, which few understood anyway, that a Hui volunteered to serve in the protection of the Great Ming that had expelled her forebears’ conquerors.
After an extended display of relaxedness that was in truth an expenditure of her patience, she finally drank enough sips of the tea to read, upon raising the bowl to her face, the secret message painted at the bottom of it. It had just two words, “serious illness,” in a fast, almost careless calligraphy. She spat out some tea to cover the words and with a deliberate air of naturalness set the bowl back on the table. She ate the remaining pieces of lamb as she considered the implications. Hers was not a position from which she could do something meaningful about that news, but her training made her view unpreparedness as irresponsible.
Her mind hadn’t yet reached any conclusion by the time she paid for her meal and walked outside to check on her quarry. Earlier that day she’d been alerted to the arrival in town of a strange man who didn’t speak Chinese but had been drawing Chinese words in the dirt begging for food and assistance. By the description of his rich clothes she’d already inferred he must be Japanese, but the Japanese were not allowed to set foot in China, so his presence demanded an explanation. No one understood his pleading cries, and he had stayed at that same corner for hours, desperately redrawing the same words every time people walked over them. Her superiors had selected her to keep an eye on him because she had studied the barbarian languages. In a crowded port like Yuegang, it was impossible to do a job like hers without knowing Portuguese and Dutch at the very least, but she was also trained in Japanese, Ryūkyūan, Mongolian, Thai, Tibetan, and Persian. She felt she couldn’t do less than be equipped to deal with every conceivable enemy of China.
She turned the corner and saw, as she expected, the Japanese man still sitting on his spot. The words he had carved on the dirt were WISH HELP STOMACH VOID. She mentally retraced the Japanese sentence he must have been trying to compose, and felt a chill of empathy. From her inquiries during the morning she’d learned Ryūkyūan captains were under orders to not let him aboard their ships, which had to mean he was considered dangerous. His clothes marked him as a lord of some importance, but he’d been thrown ashore without his sword and, more obviously, without his retinue. If he was planning any action against China, he’d chosen an extremely ineffective way of going about it.
One street away she saw a group of men staring at her. They seemed to have noticed her interest in the stranger. Such attention would have been hard to avoid. She wore, not only for her assignments but in her daily life, the attire of a government eunuch, which she had chosen as a survival strategy to make a living, but also meant stealth was never an option. She made a snap calculation of risks and walked toward the stranger as swiftly as she could, which wasn’t much, and greeted him in Japanese. “I can get you food and shelter. You’re not safe out here.”
The man looked at her with sudden gratitude, and the painful slowness with which he stood up made her suspect he’d been hungry since before he’d reached the town. “I will be greatly in your debt, sir. I need to return to Japan with urgency.”
The corner of her eye perceived the approach of three men; in front of her, an alleyway led to one possible route to her safehouse. “We need to go.”
With a gesture, she led him into the alleyway, letting him walk in front of her because she knew what was coming. They were just out of the line of sight from the street when she positioned her feet for a quick turn. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder.
“What’s the hurry?” said a man’s voice.
Bending her torso to free her shoulder, she turned on her heel, faced her follower and grabbed the base of his forearm, extending a finger to press a sensitive spot between the bones of the elbow joint. “Leave,” she warned.
Two more men ran to join the first, who closed his free hand and aimed a jab at Xiaobo’s jaw. With a shove from her grasping hand, she forced him to turn, sending his fist over her shoulder and scraping it on the wall.
As he retreated in pain and the other two struggled to move past him, she took a step back and assessed her chances. The next hit missed her head entirely as she threw herself to the ground, rolling into a crouch. The second assailant, surprised at the move, approached her with the intent to land a kick, believing he had thrown her down.
He was wrong. That was her fighting stance.
She proceeded to confuse her attackers, shifting her low position with impossible flexibility in the narrow space of the alleyway, pivoting on her arms or rolling on her back so she ended up always beyond or between or behind or below their attempts to strike. She rolled on the floor and around their legs with expert precision, keeping her torso down and extending her arms to block their fists and throw them at one another, twisting their limbs or pushing their joints so they wasted momentum, inserting her feet between theirs to lock their motion and sweep them off balance, constantly repositioning herself to stay vexingly out of their range of motion. It should not be possible to fight while lying down, but with that style she comfortably threw each of them headfirst at the walls until they all lay unconscious and bleeding.
She rose to her feet and checked on the man from Japan. She was about to ask him how he was, but the way he was staring at her cut off that line of conversation. That look was known to her. Even if he hadn’t recognized her official robes, he’d heard her voice, and now showed the typical embarrassment of a man who knew he owed his life to a eunuch.
“Just be glad it ended,” she muttered as she led the way toward the safehouse. A moment later, upon hearing no footsteps from him, she turned back and grabbed his shoulders. “A man bred like you was probably trained to fight, but you don’t have your sword and you haven’t eaten. So stop sulking and come.” The suspicion that he might be an agent from the Shōgun sent to launch an attack against the Emperor of China now seemed unfounded to her, but she still felt curious for his story. With a resigned sigh, Xiaobo added, “My name is Ma Liang. I work for the Great Ming. If you are not an enemy of China, you have nothing to fear from me.” He kept looking at the ground in silence, and her patience was nearing its limit. “Can you at least tell me why you were brought here?”
With his gaze still pointed downward, he said, “You didn’t kick them.” Then she realized he was looking at her padded shoes.
She stepped back, feeling unmasked. “Why would that matter?”
“You’re right that I’m in no condition to defend myself. But in Japan we, too, know something of fighting styles.” He pointed at the three men slowly bleeding to death in the alleyway. “They gave you plenty of openings where the most efficient move for you would have been a kick. And every time, you refused that option.”
She resorted to outrage to try to deflect his chain of thought. “It’s bold of you to presume to give lessons to the one who fended off your muggers.”
He looked up. “I apologize for my thoughtless words. You have done a great good to me, and the rest of my years will be lived in debt to you. But I know what the Chinese do to women’s feet.” He paused, wishing he could avoid the sentence that followed. “I think you aren’t really a eunuch.”
She replied with automatic coldness, “What I am is of no consequence to you.”
“I’m not Chinese, and I was able to figure it out. I’m sure anyone in this country who sees how you fight can make the same conclusion I did.”