Chapter 172

We have spent a good while talking about unimportant things, the ones one can only permit oneself when the important thing has already been said, when the door of my room opens for the second time tonight.

My mother falls silent in the middle of a sentence and the two of us turn our heads toward the sound at once, with that involuntary synchrony of one who has spent half the night waiting for an interruption without wanting to admit it.

And this time it is indeed Lianhua.

She comes in with the same discretion as always, closing the door at her back with softness, and the moment she is inside she inclines toward my mother in a perfect reverence.

Although she is dressed in her usual clothing and her face is exactly the same as a few hours ago, there is something about her that doesn’t quite fit. I wouldn’t know how to explain what, because she is not disheveled, nor is she out of breath, nor does she bring a single wrinkle out of place, but my senses, much finer than suits me at times, notice that she brings the cold of the street stuck to her clothing and that she is breathing a bit more slowly than normal, like one who has spent a while obliging herself to do so.

And I decide, as I have been deciding for days now, that it is not my affair.

“Lianhua”, I tell her, sitting up a bit more against the pillows. “Have you finished your affairs?”

“Yes, Zhāohuán Wen”, she answers me with that voice of hers, tranquil as a pond. “I have finished everything I had to do and I am prepared for us to leave at any moment.”

And there is something in the way she says it, in the way of expressing herself, that makes it clear to me that the sentence means considerably more than it reveals, but I don’t ask because days ago I gave her my word that I would not, and because a word that is only kept when one doesn’t feel like breaking it is worth absolutely nothing.

My mother, meanwhile, has witnessed the exchange in silence, with her gaze going from Lianhua to me and from me to Lianhua, and for an instant I am sure that she is going to ask what I have not asked, because my mother has authority to spare to do it and criterion to spare to know that she could, but she does not do it.

Instead of that, she lets the air out slowly and raises her hand to caress my hair, brushing it away from my forehead with the back of her fingers.

“It is better that I leave”, she tells me in a low voice. “It is very late now.”

“It hasn’t dawned yet”, I protest, and it comes out of me more childish than I intended.

“Precisely because of that”, she answers me, and her hand does not stop. “Try to sleep a bit, Wen. Tomorrow a very busy day awaits you.”

And I could argue it with her, because arguing is one of the few things I am good at in this world and because we both know that few hours remain and neither of the two of us wants to spend them sleeping.

But I also know that she is right, and above all I know what it is costing her to be the one who gets up first, so I look at her and, with a smile that comes out more crooked than I would like, I give her the only honest answer I have.

“I’ll try”, I tell her.

My mother nods and prepares to get up from the edge of the bed, and I notice all at once that my time is running out, that the moment she gets to her feet and crosses that door there will no longer be another conversation, nor another night, nor another opportunity, and that everything I don’t say right now is going to be left unsaid forever.

And there's a word I've spent thirteen years without saying because I didn't want to give hope about a feeling I didn't have, especially because I still remember the parents and the siblings I grew up alongside in another world, the ones I consider my true parents, no matter how badly it makes me feel to admit it.

But in spite of everything, she has been the best mother someone like me could have, especially in a society like this one, so she has earned having me say it to her at least once.

“Thank you for everything”, I tell her before she manages to straighten up entirely. “Truly. Thank you for absolutely everything, Mama.”

My mother stays completely motionless upon hearing me.

She says nothing, she does not ask me to repeat it nor try to act tough, I only see how, under the low light of the lamp, her eyes grow damp and then she leans over me, very slowly, and kisses me on the forehead.

It is a long kiss, one that lasts a couple of seconds longer than normal. I also notice how the hand she has resting beside my head trembles a little, and I oblige myself to stay still and not say anything more because if I open my mouth right now it is probable that I will ruin everything.

When she straightens up, she has already put her mask back in its place. The eyes keep shining, that she cannot help, but her back is straight, her chin at its exact angle and Guifei Xiang is back again, so without saying a single word more, she turns around and walks toward the door.

Lianhua steps aside and inclines as she passes, and the door opens and closes behind her.

I stay looking at the wood for a few seconds with the absurd sensation that something much larger than a conversation has just ended, until I oblige myself to look away and to look at Lianhua, who is still standing beside the little table as if she had been there all night.

“Go to sleep”, I tell her. “I am going to try to as well.”

“I still have to make a couple of preparations”, she answers me without moving. “And I prefer to do them taking advantage of the fact that it is night.”

I arch an eyebrow.

“Lianhua, you have been out all night”, I tell her. “And tomorrow we leave.”

“A night without sleeping, once you have the Nature Gate open, is nothing”, she answers me with naturalness. “And I prefer to have resolved everything that can be resolved before it dawns.”

And there I fall silent, because she is completely right and because, besides, I am nobody to argue with the woman who has spent twelve years multiplying herself on four hours of sleep about how to administer her nights.

“You will know what is best for you”, I tell her finally as I let myself drop entirely onto the pillows. “Good night, Lianhua.”

“Good night, Zhāohuán Wen”, she answers me.

Next she approaches the little table, puts out the lamp my mother lit upon entering and the room is left in darkness again, with the only faint clarity of the corridor outlining her silhouette an instant before she leaves and closes the door behind her.

And I stay lying in the darkness, with the jade seal still somewhere among the sheets, the pendant cold against my chest and my last words to my mother going around in my head accompanied by the absolute certainty that, indeed, tonight I am not going to sleep.

Someone shakes my shoulder softly and I emerge from sleep with the impression that I have dreamed something important but I don’t remember what.

“Zhāohuán Wen”, I hear. “It is time.”

I open one eye and then the other to discover that the room is already lit while Lianhua is leaning over me.

“Already?” I ask, and it comes out of me with the voice of one just awakened, which in my case is an especially undignified voice.

I stretch slowly, extending my arms upward while my body protests over the very few hours I have granted it, because in the end I did manage to fall asleep, although so late that I am not sure it compensates.

“Is it time?” I ask again, this time coherently.

“Yes”, Lianhua answers me. “It is time to go have breakfast.”

And those seven words, so absolutely everyday that I have heard them practically every morning of my life, today sound in a completely different way, so I sit up on my elbows, lift my gaze toward the beams of the ceiling and choose the usual one.

I concentrate on it, use Myriad Hands and begin to pull until I remain suspended in the air, after which Lianhua approaches to begin dressing me, and here comes the first important detail of the morning, because she puts on me exactly the same light clothing I have been using these last years since it occurred to Xia to complain about the heat in front of me, just as we decided days ago.

When she finishes adjusting the last folds and I release the technique, Lianhua gathers me in her arms before I manage to fall entirely, seats me in the chair, places my legs in their spot and gives one last review to the fall of the skirt.

We leave the room and travel the corridors of the Pavilion toward the breakfast hall, and I go looking at everything with an intensity I don’t bother to disguise because there is no one in front who could notice it.

The red columns, the corner where the floor always creaks on the same board, the corridor down which Xia used to come running every morning before Lianhua taught her not to run in the hallways and down which she keeps running every morning as if no one had said anything to her.

Thirteen years in a hallway yield much more than one would expect.

When we reach the hall, my mother and Lingxi are already there, my mother seated in her usual spot with a cup between her hands and Lingxi standing a step behind with the teapot, exactly the same as any other morning of the last few years, and only someone who knew them very well would notice that my mother has slept as little as I have.

“Good morning, Mother”, I tell her while Lianhua places me in my spot.

“Good morning, Wen”, she answers me, and her voice is exactly the same as always. “You’ve risen early.”

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“Not much”, I tell her.

And we have breakfast as if nothing were happening, and that is probably the most difficult part of the whole morning, much more than everything that comes afterward.

We talk about the heat, which continues to be unbearable, and about a peony in the courtyard that has dried up, and about whether it is going to rain today. Lingxi refills my cup twice without my asking her to and leaves in front of me the bowl she knows I like without commenting on it.

My mother corrects my posture once, as she has been doing since I have memory.

And there is not a single look too many, not a single long pause, not a single sentence that departs from the script, because in an entire Pavilion full of handmaidens who come and go with trays, a script is exactly the only thing we can permit ourselves.

When I finish, I leave the chopsticks, wipe myself and let loose the sentence I have been repeating every morning for years.

“Lianhua, take me to the study.”

And my mother lifts her gaze from her cup and looks at me after I say those words.

It is a very short instant, so short that none of the handmaidens of the hall could interpret it as anything different from a mother looking at her daughter, and then she lowers her gaze toward the tea again.

“Don’t work too late”, she tells me.

“I won’t”, I answer her.

And that is all, that is the farewell.

Lianhua takes me out of the hall, we travel the Pavilion to my study, we enter quickly and she closes the door at our backs and throws the bolt, and the moment I hear the click of the metal I notice that my whole body relaxes all at once.

Inside, Xia is waiting for us, standing beside the table, with a bundle of cloth between her arms and a face that is a poem of poorly contained nerves.

I bring my hand to the little bag where I carry the talismans out of pure reflex, but before I manage to take out a Privacy Talisman Lianhua stops me with a gesture.

“If you activate it, afterward we will not be able to hear Lingxi when she comes to fetch us”, she tells me.

And I sigh, because she is right and because this is exactly the kind of detail that would have escaped me.

“All right”, I concede. “But I hope that not activating it doesn’t end up complicating things for us.”

“If we speak in a low voice, no one should have any reason to hear us”, Xia intervenes, and she says it in a whisper so exaggerated that it is almost counterproductive.

But she is not wrong, so I lower my voice and go straight to the matter.

“Did you bring the clothing?” I ask her.

And Xia, instead of answering, limits herself to extending her arms and holding out the bundle she is carrying.

Lianhua takes it, leaves it on the table to unroll it, and after doing so reveals that inside there are three folded outfits. Two are uniforms of a low-class handmaiden, of that coarse fabric and indefinite color worn by those who move merchandise, carry water and whom no one ever looks in the face. The third is a normal and ordinary outfit, without embroidery, without adornments and without anything that draws attention, of the type any girl from a family without money would wear.

“We have to change quickly”, I say looking at the three. “I don’t want Lingxi to have to wait for us when she appears.”

Lianhua and Xia change first, and they do it with an efficiency that leaves no room for conversation. Xia struggles a second with the knot of the sash, but Lianhua ties it for her without saying anything and in less time than a cup of tea lasts the two of them have stopped being my bodyguard and my cook to become two servants of the kind seen by the dozen in the service corridors of the Imperial Palace.

And afterward it is my turn, so I hang again from the beam of the study with Myriad Hands. Between the two of them they remove the Pavilion clothing from me and dress me in the outfit of a low-class girl, while I limit myself to turning a bit here and lifting an arm there.

The fabric scratches. Not much, but it scratches, and I oblige myself to register the sensation without complaining because today this is what there is.

When I come down and Lianhua seats me in the chair again, she approaches the wardrobe at the back, opens it and takes out the Storage Bag.

She puts her hand inside and takes out of it something I recognize instantly, and it is my jewelry box.

Next she begins to put away in it, one by one, all the jewels they have just removed from me. The hairpins, the bracelets, the rings, the necklace, each one in its compartment until the jewelry box is full, but before putting it away, she lifts her gaze toward me.

“Do you want to put away the new pendant as well?” she asks me.

And I, without even thinking about it, bring my hand to my chest and press the shape of the leaf over the fabric of the outfit.

“No”, I tell her. “Not that one. That one, like the earrings, I wear.”

Lianhua looks at me a second, and for once she does not argue nor insist nor make me see that a pendant like that on the neck of a girl dressed as a poor girl is exactly the kind of contradiction that could ruin our entire day.

And I thank her for it in silence, because it would not have served any purpose either.

So she limits herself to putting the jewelry box back into the Bag, closes its mouth and hangs it crossed over her shoulders to secure it well, and the moment the cloth settles against her side it stops being the most valuable artifact there is inside this Pavilion to resemble what it is, an old and threadbare satchel that would not draw anyone’s attention even if she left it lying in the middle of the street.

She has barely finished when there is a knock at the door with three soft, spaced and perfectly polite raps, and a voice on the other side identifies itself in a low voice.

“It’s Lingxi”, says the voice.

Lianhua draws back the bolt and opens with caution, checking the corridor before the person, and Lingxi enters quickly and closes the door behind her.

“I have already given the orders to the handmaidens so that they are occupied in other places”, she says without losing a second. “The way is clear, but the sooner you leave, the fewer risks.”

Lianhua nods and, without saying anything, positions herself in front of the chair, crouches with her back to me and waits, so I lean forward, pass my arms over her shoulders and hold on tightly while she supports my legs, after which she straightens up with ease.

And from that place, with the world suddenly half a meter higher, I look at my chair.

There it stays, in the middle of the study, empty, and I oblige myself to look away quickly because I already know there is another one waiting for me at the end of all this and because if I set about mourning a piece of furniture, I might not get out of this room.

She descends, maneuvering with extreme care, calculating every movement so as not to strike my head or my back against the edge of the hollow, and I notice how perfectly she compensates for my weight at each rung as she descends.

“Wait a moment”, I tell her.

The three of them look at me and I point with my chin at the desk of the study, where there is a small wooden coffer and, on top of it, a sealed envelope.

“Lingxi”, I tell her. “When you can, give my mother the coffer and the envelope.”

Lingxi looks at the table.

“And tell her one thing very clearly”, I continue. “That she read the envelope before opening the coffer. The envelope first, it is important.”

Lingxi looks at the coffer, then the envelope, and then me, and for a couple of seconds she says absolutely nothing.

And in those two seconds I see pass across her face everything she is not going to say aloud, because this woman has seen me born, has seen me crawl, has carried me in her arms when Lianhua could not and has been a step behind my mother in each and every one of the fights she has waged for me, so in the end she lets out a sigh that seems to come from her very soul.

“I will do it this very night”, she tells me. “When I can return to the study discreetly and without anyone seeing me enter.”

“Thank you”, I tell her. “Then we can go now.”

We leave the study with Lingxi ahead, and from there on everything becomes a succession of hallways, always the service ones, always the narrow ones, with Lingxi leaning out first at each crossing and making a gesture to us with her hand before continuing, and at no moment do we come across anyone, which is exactly the result a woman who has spent years organizing the shifts of the handmaidens of this Pavilion can easily create.

And after a short while we enter a small room I don’t remember ever having visited.

Lingxi closes the door, crosses to the center and partially rolls up the carpet that covers almost the entire floor, folding it over itself with two quick movements to reveal that underneath, fitted into the wood with such cleanness that from a hand-span away it would not be seen, there is a trapdoor.

Lingxi opens it, and from the hollow there rises a gust of cold and humid air with the smell of stone and earth.

“Do you have everything prepared on the other side?” she asks looking at Lianhua.

“It is all done”, Lianhua answers her.

“Then hurry”, says Lingxi. “I will take care of erasing any trace you may have left.”

And afterward, with the trapdoor open at her feet and without letting go of the corner of the carpet, she lifts her gaze and looks at the three of us.

“Safe journey”, she tells us.

And I, from Lianhua’s back, with my arms around her neck and my stomach in a knot, tell her the only thing I truly care about leaving said in this house.

“Thank you, Lingxi”, I tell her. “And please, take care of my mother.”

Lingxi presses her lips together and nods a single time when, without giving us time for more, Lianhua goes down through the trapdoor.

She descends, maneuvering with extreme care, calculating every movement so as not to strike my head or my back against the edge of the hollow, and I notice how perfectly she compensates for my weight at each rung as she descends.

Xia comes in behind us with a lamp already lit in her hand, and the moment her feet touch the floor of the passage we hear, above our heads, how the trapdoor closes, and with it the last remnant of light from the Pavilion disappears, so that, from that moment on, the only thing there is in the hallway is the trembling circle of Xia’s lamp.

Lianhua advances quickly, without hesitating a single time, and Xia goes behind us lighting the floor.

The passage is exactly what one would expect of a passage, narrow, of stone and with the ceiling low enough that I, riding on Lianhua’s back, have to duck my head in a couple of stretches.

But fortunately, the route is short, and that I already knew beforehand, because this passage does not end outside the Imperial Palace, only outside the Pavilion, and that is precisely the reason why everything that comes next is necessary.

At the end of the tunnel there are some stairs, and at the end of the stairs there is a door that Lianhua pushes with her foot to finally emerge in a storeroom.

It is a square and dusty room, with shelves leaning against the walls full of boxes that don’t seem to have been touched by anyone in years, and the moment Lianhua steps aside I see that the door through which we have just come out is, seen from this side, more shelves, indistinguishable from its neighbors save for the detail that it is ajar.

It is a half-abandoned place, of the kind that exist in every corner of the world because there is always a room that was filled once and that no one has remembered since.

And in the center, clean and without a speck of dust in a room where everything else has spent years breeding it, there is one of those carts seen crossing the courtyards of the Imperial Palace at all hours, all loaded with clothing, with coal or with crockery.

I look at it knowing perfectly what awaits me and I let out a sigh.

“I still think my plan was better”, I say in a low voice.

“Which of them?” asks Lianhua, who is already approaching the cart.

“The one about getting me out of the Imperial Palace inside a rolled-up carpet”, I answer her.

“That plan could have drawn even more attention”, she tells me without being altered in the least. “And, even so, it would not have permitted us to take out the backpacks with discretion.”

“I already know”, I tell her. “You have told me three times, and all three times you were right.”

I make a pause.

“But it is that the idea of getting in there gives me claustrophobia just from thinking about it”, I tell her. “And complaining is the only thing I can do to calm myself, so let me do it.”

And behind me, I hear perfectly how Xia swallows a laugh.

“Come on, put me in already”, I tell Lianhua finally. “It is better not to delay the matter any further.”

Lianhua uses Myriad Hands and opens the lid of the cart.

Inside, placed standing against the walls and secured in such a way that they cannot move, are our two backpacks, leaving between them a perfectly calculated gap, and that is the kind of detail that sums up Lianhua better than anything I could say about her.

She leans back, lowers me from her back with care, takes me in her arms and puts me into the cart between the two backpacks, settling me on my side, placing my legs and adjusting my back against one of them until she is satisfied with the posture.

“Are you comfortable?” she asks me in a low voice.

“As in a cradle”, I answer her with irony.

Lianhua, next, takes some bundles of clothing that were piled up nearby and begins to place them over me, covering first my legs, then my body and lastly, with more care than necessary, my face.

And afterward she closes the lid making the world turn black.

Inside it smells of old cloth and of wood, the air heats up right away with my own breathing and the space is exactly what I need, not a finger more, which is admirable from the logistical point of view and considerably less admirable from the point of view of being the one who suffers it.

I hear how Lianhua and Xia exchange a couple of words, I hear the creak of the shafts as they are lifted and then I notice the first tug when the cart sets off.

And while I hold on to the straps of one of the backpacks so as not to knock my head against the wall of the cart with its rattling, I sigh and devote myself to the only thing I can do in my situation, which is to wait.

To hope that no one’s attention is drawn by a delivery cart crossing the Imperial Palace first thing in the morning, which is exactly the hour at which hundreds of them cross it.

And to hope, above all, that it doesn’t occur to any of the guards at the gates, as tends to be canon in practically all the stories I have read in my life, to drive a spear into the cart to check that it isn’t carrying anyone inside.