4 Part 3

Lian had not planned to return to Mei's room that night, but she had wanted to.

When the two of them woke up late into the morning, Mei warned that they would soon be kicked out, and Lian had dressed quickly and left with barely more than a few words shared between the two women. She then met with Jiang in the lobby of the expensive inn where they had taken rooms.

"There you are!" He exclaimed when she walked through the door. "I was worried sick when I couldn't find you this morning."

"I, uh," she lowered her voice a bit as she approached him, "stayed in the Golden Slumbers overnight."

Jiang laughed, then dropped his voice to match hers. "Here I was worried you wouldn't know how to properly enjoy your money."

Lian fidgeted, uncomfortable even thinking about the night before in Jiang's presence. "Yeah, well. I want to go change clothes. Are you hungry? We can eat lunch."

Once back inside her room – another three silver pieces she'd used up without even sleeping in the room – she changed and the first regrets of the night before hit her. It took her far longer to change than it should have, and when she did go out with Jiang to eat, she couldn't concentrate on anything. The food tasted bland, even though she'd been assured by Jiang that it had been prepared by one of the best chefs in the western half of the Empire. He informed her about the way the pig had been fed nothing but sorghum, mangoes, and sugar to sweeten its meat; about the travels of the peppers, which had been carted non-stop from Qi Kingdom for two days to ensure they remained fresh and crisp; about the rare spices that added a slow-burning heat to the entire dish, shipped from far past the Slave Islands to the east.

"So," he concluded his detailed story, "what do you think?"

"About what?" Lian asked, having heard every word and understood each one, but failing to muster the will to follow the path of them towards any sort of meaning.

"About the food!" Jiang bellowed.

Lian lifted a portion to her mouth, ingested a bite, chewed dutifully, and swallowed.

"It tastes like pork," she summarized.

Jiang's face fell apart for a brief moment. But then he remembered he was a merchant of the rarest type – deliriously rich. "Ok, so, food is off the table. What do you want to do the rest of the day?"

Having it posed to her that way, Lian, once again, knew exactly what she wanted. She was almost ashamed to have it be so clear and transparent. But there it was. She wanted to see Mei again.

Of course Jiang's question had been rhetorical. "There is a gallery here – all the greatest masterworks of the Zhezhun people. From before the Empire even. I've been told it's absolutely a must-see."

"I don't know if I feel like standing around in a gallery all afternoon…"

"Nonsense! How often do you get a chance to see priceless works of art?" Jiang brushed aside her attempt to back out of his plan.

So after lunch they went to the gallery – a large space that had once been a domed coliseum for the plays and spectacles of the Central Empire. Such roving shows had long since moved on to outdoor venues where more people could be squeezed in and more money generated. So the stairs had been removed, the walls cleaned, and the interior illuminated by the latest glass windows. And a gallery was born.

Jiang, like most of the other patrons visiting the gallery that day, was mostly interested in the works by the relatively recent Zhezhun artists who had come to prominence over two hundred years ago. Their paintings were of two types. The first was exclusively of the Zhezhun countryside, featuring tiny figures dwarfed by all the features of the landscapes: the hills filled with crops, the winding rivers, and the cloudy expanses of skies. Lian, whose education on art extended all the way to being able to say "yes, that's a painting", didn't have many opinions on art, but she hated landscapes. They bored her with the same things she'd seen a million times in her travels. At least paintings about people could show her something new.

So she was surprised to find even less enjoyment in the other set of paintings. These masterpieces were a set of portraits, almost exclusively of beautiful Zhezhun women. Lian felt she should have been able to admire these pictures at least, given her experiences the night before, but after staring at a few she was sick of them. In each the woman was arranged in an unnatural position to highlight a curve in her body or the few slices of skin the painter dared depict. Their faces were all in various positions of feminine coquettishness, stuck in some stance between rejecting the painter but secretly wanting to accept them, and accepting them outright. These were the paintings that had helped cement the Zhezhun myth of beauty: the ultimate prizes to be conquered, just as the Emperor had done in the previous dynasty.

All they did for Lian was bring back painful memories of Mei's every move the night before. But it wasn't a longing to see Mei make those same faces again that hurt Lian. In fact it was the exact opposite. She felt ashamed of how she'd behaved the night before, and how quickly she'd fallen into the artifice of Mei's every move.

She had been playing the part of seductress, the same as the models had for painters two hundred years ago. Not that Lian had expected honesty in a brothel. She had gone there wanting to experience the painted women made flesh, and she'd thoroughly enjoyed it. Only now it was striking her as hollow, just as the eyes of the women in the paintings seemed trapped by the awkward pose of their bodies and faces. She'd treated Mei as a thing to be used, gawked at. Lusted over. And doing so had wounded Lian in a way and shape she couldn't quite fathom.

All she thought about was Mei's response when she asked her if she was from Zhezhun.

"I am, actually."

Only now could she hear and understand the inflection in Mei's words: a strange mix of continued surprise and bitter irony. As if being Zhezhun and a woman in a brothel had been some long-running and cruel joke that Mei couldn't help but laugh at, her existence as a cliché funny despite the obvious anguish it caused her.

It was the same way Lian usually told someone, "I don't drink alcohol." A comment designed to cover up a pain she hadn't chosen, but nonetheless had to live with. With Mei she hadn't bothered with the artifice, and had enjoyed speaking the truth for once. Yet Mei herself had been locked up in expectations, sheltering Lian from any truth of her life. The truth of a woman with few choices.

None of which was unexpected for a woman in a brothel. Lian knew this, and knew she shouldn't be hurt by it. Yet the pain continued. And eventually, as Jiang and she were leaving the gallery – Jiang going on and on about the height of Zhezhun culture, oblivious to Lian's mute reaction – she realized why.

Lian genuinely liked Mei, even at the woman's most artificial. They had spoken barely a few dozen words, but in those words she had found someone in kinship with herself. There was the physical attraction, to be sure, and the sexual ecstasies had enhanced that attraction, but those few dozen words had done more than anything else to draw Lian to Mei. They were the slipped exposure of collarbone, the slight reveal of an ankle beneath thick billows of robes. They'd whetted her appetite for a woman who, like Lian, had become very good at her profession but lost something in the process. And Lian needed to find out what that something was. She had wanted to see Mei again – she'd known that for a few hours – but by the time Jiang and she were sitting down to dinner in another fashionable Yiwu tea house, it had transformed into a need.

"I think I may head back to the Golden Slumbers tonight," she told Jiang, completely without plan or thought.

Jiang was stunned. Mostly because he'd been halfway into the evening's iteration of "The Story of the Meal: It's Humble Beginnings and Great Achievements" but also because he hadn't seen this coming. Granted, he knew Lian had been slightly off all day, but he assumed it was just a bit of exhaustion and some discomfort arising from the transition to her newer, better, and much richer lifestyle.

He recovered enough to grin his reply. "Got a taste of something particularly delicious, did we?" Lian blushed, realizing what she'd said and stuffing her face with food instead of responding. Jiang laughed, then watched the woman who had made both of them richer than he'd ever imagined.

He'd met her a number of times, but never spent more than a few days with her before their meeting in Three Paths. She was a good woman, and would have made an excellent Shuli Go. But out in the real world, where men and women operated without a strict code, it seemed like she was still struggling to find her way. Even though they were the same age, the Shuli Go magic ensured her body aged only half as quickly as a normal individual, and so she still had the youthful glow of a woman in her late twenties, just truly settling into the role the world laid out for her. Jiang had two daughters of his own, and he'd been preparing himself to let them make their own decisions for over a decade. In that moment, he couldn't help but feel a pang of what was coming to the other women in his life: foreknowledge of an inevitable mistake that he nonetheless couldn't stop. He told himself he had to let the woman walk into, and out of, her own problems.

So that night, he bid Lian farewell and watched as she walked, then sprinted, towards the Golden Slumbers. Unlike his daughters, at least, Jiang was comforted by the knowledge that Lian had two swords that could cut her out of most kinds of trouble.