Chapter 177

It is barely mid-afternoon when I notice something that departs from the script the caravan has followed for the last month and a bit.

I notice it the way one always notices such things, with the rhythm of the hooves shortening while they become irregular, and then comes that forward sway so characteristic of a carriage that is braking and not simply adjusting its pace.

And it is not by a long shot the hour to stop, since there are at least three hours of light left and these people do not halt with three hours of light ahead of them no matter what happens, so I sit up a bit and push aside the little curtain to look out the window.

And what I see surprises me, since in front of us, closing the horizon from side to side, there is a wall.

It is not a palisade, nor the little wall of mud and stone that surrounds the large villages of this zone and that serves above all to make clear where the village ends. It is a real wall, tall, of dark ashlar, with towers evenly spaced and with an open gate toward which all the traffic of the road is heading in two more or less orderly lines.

It is a city, a real city, and I have spent five weeks without seeing one.

Because that has been the constant of the whole journey. We have gone around, dodging and leaving to one side every large center we have come across in order to sleep in roadside inns, in villages with a single street and in a couple of places I am not sure had a name.

No one has ever explained the reason to me aloud, and I have not asked either because there is no need at all, since that is called not leaving traces.

I oblige myself to breathe deeply after the surprise and to look more closely.

Ahead, at the head of our little line, I see Chen Mo, who has already gotten down from the driver’s seat of the first cart and is standing beside the gate, talking with two guards.

There is no tension in anyone’s shoulders, there are no hands near anything sharp, and one of the guards has his weight resting on a single leg with that posture of a functionary who has spent six hours on his feet and is already thinking about the hour he gets off. Clearly it is a boring conversation, and boredom, in these matters, is an excellent sign.

And then, without stopping speaking, Chen Mo does something with his right hand.

It is a small and very clean gesture, of the kind I imagine is learned with practice, and it consists of bringing the hand toward the guard at waist height, at a point that stays below the line of sight of anyone who might be watching from three paces beyond, and withdrawing it empty again.

And in that hand, for half a second, there is a little bag.

The guard does not look at it, nor bring it up to his eyes, nor check anything, but rather he simply makes it disappear among his clothes with the naturalness of one who has made that same movement so many times that it has already become automatic, smiles at Chen Mo, tells him something I don’t hear and steps aside while he makes a gesture to his companion.

And the caravan enters the city without stopping a single instant more, so I let the little curtain drop, lean against the backrest and let the air out slowly.

Because I have just crossed the gate of a walled city in a world with powers, creatures taken from mythology and millenary sects, thanks to exactly the same mechanism by which in my other life one got a container out of the port on a Tuesday instead of on a Friday.

Thirteen years in this world and I still get surprised, which says fairly little in my favor because there are clichés that are clearly universal as the Imperial Court demonstrated to me.

Although, being honest, it is not as if I am complaining either. I can spend ten minutes getting morally indignant about the matter, or I can acknowledge that that little bag has just saved us a line in which we could have been for hours, and it may even have avoided a search.

The moment we pass the gate, the caravan slackens its pace, and it is exactly at that moment when I see through the little window something I did not expect, since Chen Mo gets down from the driver’s seat of the first cart.

He does not stop it, nor make any signal to Pei Gang, but rather he simply drops down to one side with an ease that a man of his age should not manage so well, lets the second cart pass beside him and waits planted in the middle of the street for my carriage to arrive.

And when it arrives, he reaches out his hand, opens the door, climbs in while it is moving and closes it behind him, all of it without the carriage reducing its speed one bit and without giving me time to say absolutely anything.

Chen Mo sits on the bench opposite, settles himself, greets Lianhua and Xia with an inclination of the head, and looks at me while I return his gaze.

“If you have climbed in while we were moving instead of waiting, it means you want to talk about something with me before we stop”, I tell him.

Chen Mo smiles when he hears me.

“That is correct”, he answers me.

And that is, more or less, the relationship we have built over the course of this month. At the beginning he spoke to me with that stiff courtesy one dedicates to a passenger who has to be delivered intact at their destination, and at some moment of the second week that gradually diluted until becoming something considerably more comfortable, which consists basically of neither of the two of us wasting time explaining what the other has already understood.

Also at some moment of that second week he began calling me Xiaojie, which is what he heard Lianhua say fifteen times a day, and I said nothing because at this point I have already assumed that I lost that battle and that there is not going to be a rematch.

“This is the city of Zibo”, Chen Mo tells me. “Our first destination, and the place where we take the boat.”

“The boat will take a couple of days to be ready to set sail, more or less”, he continues. “And what I have come to ask you is whether you prefer that we lodge you in an inn in the meantime, or whether you prefer to install yourselves directly on the boat.”

And I listen to him, nod slowly, and take a second before answering.

Not because I have to think about the answer, which I have had crystal clear since before he finished the sentence, but because I want to give it to him in a manner that serves him for something.

“Chen Mo”, I tell him with a smile. “Let me ask you a question.”

“Go ahead”, he tells me.

“Imagine that we lodge in an inn”, I begin. “And that the authorities of this city have already received, through whatever channels, a notification about the disappearance of the Zhāohuán.”

I make a very brief pause, just enough.

“How long do you think would pass until they found out that there is lodged a girl who is exactly the age of the Zhāohuán and who, coincidentally, also cannot walk?” I ask him. “And how much longer until someone with a uniform presents themselves at the door to check it?”

And what happens next is one of the things I like most about this man, because Chen Mo does not get defensive and does not search for half a second for an elegant way of being right, but rather he raises his right hand and passes it over his head, from his forehead to the nape of his neck, very slowly.

It is a gesture I have seen him make eleven or twelve times this month, always at the same exact moment, which is the moment in which he has just discovered that something has escaped him, and that at this point I have catalogued mentally with the same assurance with which one catalogues a piece of pottery. When Chen Mo passes his hand over his head, Chen Mo is acknowledging a mistake.

“I had not thought of that”, he tells me.

“I imagined as much”, I answer him without any malice.

“And you are completely right”, he continues. “It is true that it would draw quite a lot of attention, unless you spent the two days shut in the room without coming down a single time.”

“Well then”, I tell him. “And look, two days shut in a room I can endure perfectly, let the record show. I have endured worse things and with less reason, but if the alternative is the boat, then the boat.”

I settle myself a bit on the bench.

“Because I suppose that on a boat I will have sufficient privacy to be able to go out on deck to get some air”, I add. “And after five weeks seated in the carriage, I assure you that strikes me as an extravagant luxury.”

Chen Mo nods.

“There would be no problem with that”, he tells me. “The boat is ours for this trip, and at the dock where it is moored there is not too much movement.”

He rests his hands on his knees.

“Then the boat”, he tells me.

“Then the boat”, I confirm to him.

“Well in that case we go directly to the port”, he tells me, after which he gets up.

And immediately afterward he opens the door, drops down from the moving carriage with the same tranquility with which he had climbed in, and I see him pass by the little window while he overtakes the merchandise cart at a brisk pace to return to his spot on the driver’s seat of the first one.

I stay looking at the closed door a moment and then I turn toward the little window, because I have an entire city waiting for me out there and I have spent five weeks without seeing anything that was not grass, road, and from time to time a cow.

And the first thing I see confirms what I had already supposed, that Zibo is a commercial city.

And I don’t say it out of intuition, but because a city tells you what it is in the first five minutes if you know what to look at. Here the main streets are wide, much wider than is needed for people to pass, which means they are dimensioned for carts to pass and for two to be able to cross without anyone having to back up. The arcades are deep and are full of piled-up merchandise.

There are three inns on the same stretch along with some warehouses with the doors thrown wide open and men in them unloading merchandise, but above all there are far more draft animals per square meter than a city that lived off something else would have.

So a commercial city, without any doubt. And since Chen Mo has just told me that here we take a boat, the evident explanation is that it is because it has a river port.

What happens is that that explanation, the more I look at it, the less it convinces me.

Because a river port is a splendid thing, I don’t dispute it, and in fact half of Europe was built around them. But a river port sustains a neighborhood, sustains a market, sustains a large village and, if the river is really good and is in the right place, sustains a medium-sized city.

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And this is not a medium-sized city.

This has an ashlar wall, has towers every forty paces, has three inns on a single street and has a quantity of traffic I have not even seen in Xi’An. There is too much money here for the size it has, and money, the same as water, always comes from some concrete place.

So I am left with doubt while the carriage advances, and I devote myself to doing the only sensible thing I can do, which is to wait to have more data.

And the data take a good while to arrive, because crossing Zibo from the gate to the port takes us considerably longer than I had calculated, which, by the way, is another piece of data in itself.

But in the end the last street opens up and I swallow all my previous thoughts, because in front of me, at the end of that street, there is water.

But not water like the water in a river, but rather there is a mass of water similar to what you would see when you approach the coast. A mass of water that occupies the entire horizon from side to side, that loses itself on both sides without giving any clue as to where it ends, and that has that slightly rough and living surface that only very large extensions of water have.

For a second, it embarrasses me quite a lot to admit it, I think I am looking at the sea, but it only lasts a second because right away I see what is happening to the surface.

It moves, and not with that characteristic swaying of waves, but rather it moves in a single direction, slowly, without haste and without pause, dragging along the way a log that goes turning on itself with that hypnotic slowness of large things that float.

That means there is a current. Slow, but a current, so I concentrate, let the Yin Gate do its work and notice how the edges of my vision sharpen, the trembling of the hot air over the water becomes clearer and the diffuse line of the background, that greenish stain that a second ago was simply the horizon, becomes a forest.

An enormous forest, dense, dark and continuous, that occupies the entire other bank and that extends without a single gap as far as I can distinguish its shapes.

I have seen the Amazon and the Congo River, in their normal course and without any flooding involved, but what I have in front of me is easily twice as wide as either of the two.

And suddenly everything fits together because I now know where this city’s money comes from.

This is not a river port like the ones I had in mind. Those river ports I had in my head were composed of a wooden dock and twelve barges, but this is a highway twenty kilometers wide that crosses who knows how many thousands of Li, and Zibo is simply the place where that highway has an exit.

And a city that sits on top of the only exit to an Empire of that highway can perfectly afford an ashlar wall and three inns on the same street.

I lean against the backrest, let the air out and laugh at myself inside, in silence, because I have just spent half an hour finding it strange that a city was too rich for its river, when the problem was not the city, the problem was that I, without realizing it, had supposed that a river of this world would always have the size of a river from mine.

And I have spent thirteen years tripping over exactly the same stone.

By the time I manage to stop turning it over, the caravan has already turned and advances parallel to the water, in the direction of one of the ends of the dock, so I take advantage of the trip to look at the boats, which is what I have been wanting to do since I saw the first one.

And the majority, to my surprise, are fishing boats.

They are unmistakable, because a fishing boat is recognized from a distance in any culture and in any century. They are small, they carry the nets stretched over the deck and they have that same deck crammed with things badly tied down that is not seen on any other type of vessel.

And it strikes me as extremely odd to see a fishing fleet on a river, until I realize that I have spent several minutes looking at a watercourse twenty kilometers wide and I am still thinking of it as if it were a river.

In twenty kilometers of water there are a lot of fish, so of course there is fishing, probably more fishing than this entire city put together can take.

And then, mixed among the fishing boats and occupying the moorings in the center, there are a few considerably larger boats.

They are of that style of ancient China, with the prow and the stern raised, the bottom flat and without anything resembling a keel, and with those internal bulkheads that can be made out from outside by the way the hull is built.

They go loaded to the top, with the cargo covered with tarpaulins and they do not have a single thing that suggests anyone has ever thought about fighting from them.

Transport boats, then. Nothing military.

And when I finish reviewing them all, I lift my gaze toward the end of the dock, which is where we are going, I see ours and I realize right away two things.

The first is that it is larger than all the rest. Not in a scandalous way, but enough that it is noticed at a glance without need of comparing it to anything.

And the second is that it is better.

And that, curiously, is noticed even more than the size. It is noticed in that the wood is cared for, in that the tarpaulins are well tied instead of simply tied, in that the ropes are gathered in coils someone has made on purpose and in that the deck does not have a single thing lying where it shouldn’t.

It is a boat someone is fond of, in short.

The caravan finally stops some twenty paces from the gangway, and the moment it does I see through the little window Chen Mo leaping from the driver’s seat even before the cart has entirely finished stopping.

And I see him go directly toward a man who is standing beside the mooring.

He is a man of middle age, or of the apparent middle age people have in this world, which is a category I have already learned not to take seriously. He is heavyset, dressed in a practical manner and the skin of his face is a color that is not achieved indoors.

Chen Mo plants himself in front of him and gives him an embrace.

A real one, besides, of those that include two slaps on the back and a shake of the shoulders, and that tells me more about the relationship between those two men than anything they may tell me afterward.

And then they begin to talk, but right away, some thirty seconds later, the man makes a bad face.

It is an absolutely evident change even from here. The smile leaves him, he throws his head back, says something that by its length must be a long sentence, and makes a gesture with his arm that takes in the whole dock and that, in any language of any world, means exactly the same as it would mean in mine.

Chen Mo raises his hands, answers.

The man answers the answer, and continues with his face twisted.

Chen Mo says something more, something short this time, and there the change occurs, because the man stops, stays silent a moment and lowers his arms.

But he does not surrender entirely, because after that pause he keeps arguing a bit more, although now with the clearly reduced energy of one who argues out of principle and not out of conviction, until finally he nods once, looks toward the carriage, and the two of them set off walking toward us.

And I, while I watch them come, already know perfectly what the argument was about.

Because one doesn’t have to be especially clever to reach this conclusion. This trip did not plan to carry passengers, since this trip is a commercial caravan with an added commission, and that boat was prepared to carry cargo, crew and seven people who were already counted in someone’s plan.

And now, suddenly, there are three more passengers, which, for a captain who has to think about where he puts people and about what happens if one has to move quickly, is not exactly good news.

So I settle myself well on the bench, smooth my skirt, and wait patiently for them to arrive.

When they arrive, Chen Mo opens the door of the carriage but does not climb in, but rather stays standing on the step, with one hand on the frame, and addresses the interior.

“Let me introduce Shen Fei”, he says. “He is the captain of the boat that will take you to the city of Sanjiang.”

And the man named Shen Fei, the moment Chen Mo finishes speaking, lets loose the following.

“That remains to be seen”, he says.

And immediately afterward, without waiting a single second, he addresses Lianhua.

Which, to be fair, has all the logic in the world, because inside this carriage there is an adult woman, an eleven-year-old girl and a thirteen-year-old kid, and any reasonable person would address the adult woman.

“Chen Mo has told me that you are members of a company affiliated with the Tower of the Five Dragons”, he tells Lianhua. “And if that is true, you can travel on my boat, because he has also told me that the passage is already paid for.”

He crosses his arms.

“But first I have to verify that it is true”, he adds.

And Lianhua, who is absolutely marvelous, does not answer.

She does not say that he has the wrong person, does not point at me, does not do anything. She simply stays exactly as still as she was, with her hands in her lap and her face politely neutral, so I cough courteously.

“I apologize for the confusion”, I say in the kindest tone I have. “But the person in charge of the company is me.”

Shen Fei turns his head toward me after hearing me, and across his face there crosses, for a very brief instant, exactly the expression I expected to cross it, which is that of a man who has just been answered by someone he did not expect.

But it lasts a short time, far less than it normally lasts, and that makes me award him quite a few points in my private estimation, because I have seen imperial functionaries with forty years in the job take considerably longer to recompose their faces than this man.

“The company is called Yuanxing Hao”, I continue, taking advantage of the pause. “The House of the Long Journey.”

Shen Fei finishes rearranging his expression, uncrosses his arms and looks at me straight on.

“In that case, it will have to be you who demonstrates it to me”, he tells me.

And I like how he says it, because he doesn’t say it with sarcasm nor with that condescension that comes over people when they decide to humor a girl, he says it exactly as he would have said it to Lianhua ten seconds ago.

So I say nothing, I limit myself to bringing my hands to the little bag I carry at my waist, undoing the knot, putting my hand inside, taking out the jade seal my mother placed in the palm of my hand the last night I saw her and holding it out to him.

Shen Fei takes it, brings it closer, turns it once between his fingers, passes his thumb over the base and stays a couple of seconds looking at it with an attention that is not at all perfunctory.

And afterward he returns it to me, but upon returning it, he says something I did not expect at all.

“You should not give it to people like that”, he tells me.

I lift my gaze, with the seal already halfway between his fingers and mine.

“I beg your pardon?” I ask him.

“That you should not give it to anyone in the hand”, he repeats. “They could steal it from you. I say it seriously, because I have seen that happen more times than I would like, and not always to careless people.”

He puts his hands at his waist after I take the seal from him.

“What you have to do is always carry ink and paper on you”, he continues. “And when someone asks you for an authentication, you stamp the paper in front of that person and give them the paper. The seal does not leave your hand at any moment.”

And I, who have spent two seconds with my hand around a seal that has just been returned to me, have to make a small effort not to be left openmouthed.

Because this man has just carried on an argument for five minutes on the dock so that he would not be obliged to take us, has come up here with his face twisted, has said that that remained to be seen, and the first thing he does after verifying that I am who I say I am is to give me free advice so that I don’t get swindled.

And on top of it, it is good advice.

“I truly thank you”, I tell him, and I put away the seal in the little bag while I speak. “And you are going to think I am naive, but I am going to explain to you why I gave it to you in your hand.”

“Go ahead”, he tells me.

“Because the boat belongs to the Tower of the Five Dragons”, I answer him. “And the reputation for integrity the Tower has is exactly the reason why my mother placed my interests in their hands instead of in anyone else’s. So, with all my respect, it was fairly difficult for me to imagine that someone from the Tower would run off with my seal.”

And that is when I discover that this man has a weak point, because Shen Fei’s right hand goes to his chest, which visibly swells without his probably realizing it.

“Well, evidently”, he tells me, and one must see how his voice has changed. “Evidently, with a member of the Tower that would never happen. Of course not.”

He clears his throat.

“But even so, take my advice and acquire the habit”, he continues, recovering his tone from before. “And once you have it, do it always, with everyone and without exceptions, even with me and even though you know perfectly that there is no need at all. Because the customs that are only practiced when they are needed are not there on the day they are truly needed.”

And I listen to that sentence and store it away, because it is exactly the same thing I used to repeat to my students about the protocol for recording an excavation, only said by a man with hands full of calluses on a dock a world away from my old faculty.

“I thank you very much for the advice”, I tell him, and this time I say it completely seriously. “And I give you my word that I am going to take it to heart.”

Shen Fei nods, clearly satisfied.

“Well then, since you have identified yourselves correctly, you can come aboard whenever you want”, he tells me.

“Thank you very much, Captain”, I answer him.

And then I turn toward the interior of the carriage.

“Well”, I say. “It is time to get down.”

And what happens next is a choreography we have spent five weeks repeating twice a day and that at this point comes out without anyone having to say anything.

Xia gets up first, hangs one of the backpacks from her shoulder and gets down with a leap. Lianhua gets down behind her, turns around, and holds out her arms to me.

I lean forward, grab on to her neck while she takes me out of the carriage and settles me against her chest with that absolute ease that, deep down, still impresses me a little.

And the moment we are outside, I lift my gaze and come across Shen Fei’s face, which is a poem.

Because the man has stayed completely still, with his mouth slightly open, watching how a woman takes a thirteen-year-old girl out of a carriage in her arms and places her on her hip instead of leaving her on the ground, and on his face one can read with all clarity the list of problems that have just appeared to him all at once.

The gangway, the ladders, the hold, what happens if there is an emergency situation, so I smile at him.

“Don’t you worry”, I tell him with all the kindness in the world. “In spite of what it may seem, we are not going to be in the way on your boat.”

And then, without stopping smiling at him, I use the Dragon’s Grip around the last backpack, the one that has been left alone on the floor of the carriage, and the backpack lifts slowly, comes out through the open door, turns in the air to stop a scant meter behind us, floating at the exact height of my own shoulder.

Shen Fei lowers his gaze toward the backpack, then raises it toward me and then lowers it toward the backpack again.

And to my left, without turning his head and without a single muscle of his face moving, I hear perfectly how Chen Mo is chuckling between his teeth.