The Hidden Blade (17 page)

After some days of trial and error, Amah became pleasantly surprised at Ying-ying’s culinary output. Her diced vegetables weren’t perfect cubes, her sliced meat nowhere near as paper-thin as that prepared by Cook, but she proved herself competent in the kitchen, with a deft sense for combining sauces and spices to create dishes that were robust without being heavy.

“Good,” Amah said. “If you can feed yourself, that’s one less worry for me.”

There were no more lessons in calligraphy, literature, painting, or music, though Ying-ying sometimes plucked at the zither and tried to duplicate the beautiful, clear notes Mother had so effortlessly created.

Amah intensified her training. Before dawn Ying-ying rose for her breathing exercises, circulating her chi throughout her torso and limbs. Hand-to-hand combat came after breakfast. Soon Amah introduced weaponry: poles, steel-spined fans, and then swords, which hitherto had all been hidden in the spaces under her
kang
.

The swords were long, slender, and surprisingly heavy, their cold, deadly beauty at once frightening and fascinating.

“Don’t use swords,” Amah admonished, “unless you plan to draw blood.”

The pole was a good weapon for a beginner, its length offering a defensive advantage. The fan could be used to conveniently incapacitate one’s opponent, its even head, when closed, perfectly suited to deliver blows to acupuncture points, which existed along longitudinal and latitudinal paths. Nerves intersected at these nodes; chi pooled. Just as needles could be inserted there to cure diseases and ease internal blockings, force correctly applied served many purposes, from stopping one’s own bleeding to utterly disabling an enemy. One could kill a man outright with a hard strike at the Jade Door Point behind the skull, or make him cry like a baby by a subtle but persistent pressure to the Tear Points on the sides of the nose.

Soon Ying-ying was covered with bruises: The pole packed a tremendous wallop; the steel spines of the fans were most unforgiving.

Not to mention that Amah made her practice scaling walls. However, Ying-ying would not be leaping from the ground straight to the rooftop, as she had imagined. Amah scoffed at that idea. Perhaps some venerable lady of the order had been able to accomplish that feat in years far beyond count. But she couldn’t. Nor had her own master. Or her master’s master.

Instead, Ying-ying was to take a running start, harnessing her chi as far up her person as possible, make for a corner in the walls, and run up half of it, so as to get high enough to hoist herself up the rest of the way.

Her behind quickly became black and blue from falling down splat.

Amah drove her pitilessly. “I learned it this way. You will too.”

This time, however, there was no inspiring demonstration. Ying-ying wondered whether Amah had completely recovered from her injury, and whether she’d ever be able to run up a wall again.

“Is this how we climb really high walls also?” She wanted to scale the sky-high city walls one day, if only for the adventure of it. She didn’t like the thought of running halfway up
that
and crashing back down to earth.

“No, for those we use grapple hooks,” Amah answered.

The next night she took Ying-ying outside the city. In the shadow of the looming wall—eight men tall and as many wingspans thick—she showed Ying-ying how that was done.

When spring came at last and the ponds and lakes thawed, Ying-ying practiced skipping rocks. Amah watched and made occasional adjustments to her technique. She didn’t want a toss but a flick. She was interested in the flexibility and strength of Ying-ying’s wrists. After Ying-ying could make every pebble skip five or six times across the surface of the water, the exercise changed to hitting targets at ten paces, mostly other rocks, then circles Amah drew on walls and tree trunks, then individual leaves in trees. When she could hit designated leaves with some accuracy, her target turned to living things.

Amah took her into the hills and fields of the countryside. There Ying-ying did her best to strike at crickets, lizards, moths. Amah also made her chase after hares, groundhogs, porcupines, any creatures that came across their path. “Remember your breath! Gird your chi! Circulate it high!”

But mostly Ying-ying remained within the confines of home. And whenever she went anywhere, Amah was always careful to give the outing legitimacy by claiming that she was taking Ying-ying to visit Mother’s grave or Mother’s favorite temple to pray for her in the underworld.

For it was important to keep Da-ren satisfied that Ying-ying was being brought up in a correct manner. The property belonged to him, and by extension, so did Ying-ying.

He visited once a month, on the seventh, to sit by himself in Mother’s old rooms, which Amah kept spotlessly clean and exactly as they had been when Mother had been alive. Before he left each time, he’d summon Ying-ying and Amah to him and inquire briefly into Ying-ying’s doings. Amah responded artfully and mostly truthfully and said Ying-ying had been learning household management, culinary arts, and needlework (firing clusters of golden needles from between her fingers, an intricate and daunting task).

The interviews unnerved Ying-ying. For as long as she could remember, he had been at the center of her life. And part of her felt that she knew him as well as any daughter could know a father: She shared his grief and she understood how lonely and embattled he must feel, with the political climate turning against his ideas.

But he, severe and aloof, always spoke to her as if she were a complete stranger.

Sometimes, after he left, she would remain in Mother’s room with a stick of Mother’s favorite incense slowly turning to ashes, and wonder why those who should be each other’s closest companions remained as if on two shores of a deep, wide sea.

One spring night, six months after Mother’s passing, Ying-ying shuddered awake from a dream of Mother, in her morbidly exquisite funeral clothes, gurgling up spurt after spurt of blood, splattering splotches and streaks of red all over herself.

With a shaking hand she wiped away the damp perspiration from her neck and her chest. Had the dream been a message from Mother’s ghost? Did ghosts get sick? If so, how could she and Amah get some medicine to her? Should they burn the herbs along with a prescription for how to prepare the potion, or should they prepare the potion and then pour it over Mother’s grave?

Ying-ying couldn’t go back to sleep. The least sound, even that of her movement on the straw mat, made her heart pound. She was ashamed to be afraid of her own mother’s ghost—Mother had never harmed a living creature when she had been alive. But Ying-ying was frightened nonetheless.

She got up and put on her slippers. She would go sleep with Amah. Amah now slept in the same room Bao-shun had used. The
kang
there was big enough for both of them.

But Amah was not there. Ying-ying stared at the empty bed. The door slammed. She jumped and screamed, looking around for a weapon while furiously praying it wasn’t a ghost, as the weapons of mortals didn’t work on ghosts, and she knew nothing of necromancy.

But it was only a gust of wind. She stood panting, momentarily relieved, but no less afraid. Where was Amah? Surely she had not gone out again. Didn’t she remember what had happened to her?

Ying-ying lit a candle. Shielding the flame with her cupped hand, she went from room to room, her heart thumping, mumbling whatever incantations she could remember, calling for protection on the Jade Emperor, the Supreme Old Lord, the merciful and compassionate bodhisattva Kuanyin.

No ghost seized her. No signs of Amah. Where was she? Had she been injured again? Ying-ying didn’t even know where to look for her if she were lying somewhere in a pool of her blood. She paced around the courtyard until the chill of the night forced her back into her own room. She blew out the candle, crawled under the covers, and waited.

It seemed that she spent hours sitting up at every noise. But the next thing she knew, Amah was at her side, waking her and telling her to dress and begin her breathing exercises. Ying-ying stared at her. Amah looked little different from other mornings, except for darker circles under her eyes. Her hair was neatly oiled and pulled back, her clothes fresh and unwrinkled. And if she noticed Ying-ying’s strange look, or the candle that had burned down to a puddle of wax on the table, she said nothing.

For the next month and half, as far as Ying-ying could tell, Amah stuck to the courtyards at night. Then she again stole out by herself. Then she was gone two nights in a row the next month.

The next morning, as Ying-ying stood in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, she recalled something Cook had said long ago.

Cook had told Little Plum that her cousin Old Luo had seen Amah once at a gambling den. Little Plum had scoffed at the reliability of the witness: Old Luo was notorious for his bad eyesight. But not only that, Amah was well-known to be dead set against gambling. She had repeatedly warned Ying-ying that it was a slippery slope leading straight to crime and penury. The claim had been promptly dropped as being too ridiculous even for a rumor.

Now Ying-ying wasn’t so sure. Old Luo’s eyes were faulty, but he wasn’t blind. If he saw Amah up close, there was no reason for him not to recognize her, nor to mistake her for anyone else. After all, the few times he had come to the kitchen, he had never mistaken Ying-ying for one of Boss Wu’s apprentice boys.

A horribly disloyal thought erupted in her head. If Amah did gamble, was she gambling with their monthly stipend from Da-ren, or worse, Ying-ying’s inheritance?

The key to the chest was in the bottom of Mother’s big trunk. When she lifted the lid of the chest, the taels of silver and the ropes of coins were exactly where they were, in cloth bundles and a silk-lined redwood box. The silver certificates, from several of the most reputable clearinghouses, lay safe and crisp in a volume of
Analects
.

She returned to the kitchen, somewhat reassured. The idea was stupid. When Da-ren came every month, he must check on their store of currency to gauge whether they had been thrifty or profligate. Amah wasn’t dumb enough to touch that money.

She was reading too much into it. It might not be gambling at all. Perhaps Amah enjoyed midnight strolls. Perhaps she had a man she liked somewhere. Perhaps there was some interesting and dangerous technique she could practice only out in the wild.

The front gate creaked. Amah had come back from the morning market with fresh pork for lunch. She entered the kitchen. Ying-ying went over to her to relieve her of her market basket.

She tripped on a low stool that she had forgotten to put away. Her arms flung out. One of her hands grabbed Amah’s right arm to hold herself upright. Amah cried out in pain and dropped her market basket. Ying-ying hastily pulled her hand back.

“Are you all right, Master?”

Amah’s face had gone white. “I’m fine. It’s nothing.”

How could she have caused so much pain to Amah with a simple grip? Ying-ying glanced down at her hand. She gasped. There was a faint smearing of red on her palm and fingers. Blood. She looked at Amah’s sleeve. It was a dark brown that showed nothing.

“Why are you bleeding?”

“I cut myself during practice. The blood might have soaked through the bandage,” Amah said brusquely. “Have you finished cutting all the vegetables yet?”

A novice such as Ying-ying might cut herself with her own sword. But Amah? “No, not quite.”

“Wash your hands. Hurry up and finish.”

They were both silent during lunch, with Ying-ying peering at Amah’s arm. Amah had changed her clothes, and presumably her bandage, as no bloodstain seeped through her gray blouse-tunic.

What was she up to? And what would Ying-ying do if one morning she woke up to find that Amah had not come back? She had no one else.

“I haven’t been sleeping very well lately,” she said. “I don’t know why. Is Master sleeping well?”

Amah’s face was inscrutable. “I sleep very well. If you have trouble sleeping, I’ll make you a potion.”

“No, no, Master mustn’t trouble herself. It’s not that bad.”

They did not speak again for the remainder of the day.