Chapter 66: Madam Bai

The Feathered Frost Sect came up the stair of the Platform on the evening of the fifth day, in a procession of white.

They came on foot. There were forty of them, in robes of plain white silk with the frost-flower at the breast, and they walked in two long lines through the golden streets of the city without looking to left or right. The crowds fell back. A hush spread before them, down the length of the Street of Seals, and the musicians in the pavilions broke off their thin sweet tune and let the silence come. They carried nothing. They wore no jewels. They walked with their hands folded in their sleeves, and a faint cold mist went before them over the stones, so that the gold lamps along the street guttered, and the bright pale gilded city seemed, for a moment, to be made of frost.

At their head walked an old woman.

She was small. That was the first thing, and the most remarkable. She was tiny, hardly taller than Ye’er, a wisp of a woman, bent a little at the shoulders, with hair as white as snow wound in a plain knot at the nape of her neck, and a face as fine and lined and clear as a sheet of old porcelain. She wore white, with no ornament. She leaned on no stick. In her hand she carried, quite casually, a long sheathed sword in a plain gray scabbard, as a woman carries an umbrella on a day that she does not think will rain.

She was seventy-three years old. She had not smiled in forty.

"That is my master," said Ji Ling’er.

She said it in an odd, tight, careful voice. She was standing very straight, in the gate-yard of the Pavilion of Quiet Reflection, in her plain gray traveling robe, with the ice-jade sword at her hip and the little bronze chrysanthemum pinned to her collar, and all the color had gone out of her face.

"She does not come to the Platform," she said. "She has not come in twenty years. She does not leave the mountain." Her hands closed and opened. "She does not leave the mountain for anything."

"Perhaps," said Li Xuan, gently, "she was asked."

"Asked by whom?"

He did not answer.

The procession came to the gate and halted.

The old woman stopped. She stood quite still, a small white figure in the golden dusk, among her silent disciples, and looked about her, at the clipped pines, the white gravel, the cedar walls. Her eyes were gray. They were extraordinarily clear and pale and cold, like the clear light on a winter lake, and they moved over everything, and rested on nothing, until they came to a girl in a gray robe with a little bronze flower at her throat.

They stopped.

There was a long silence.

"Ling’er," said the Master of the Feathered Frost.

Her voice was thin and dry and very quiet. It did not carry. It did not need to.

Ji Ling’er went down on both knees on the white gravel. She did it quickly, with a single clean movement, and bowed her forehead to the ground, and stayed there. Her shoulders were rigid. She did not say anything.

"You may rise."

She rose.

The old woman looked at her for a very long time. She looked at her face, and her hands, and the sword at her hip, and the little round bronze flower. She looked, last, with a sort of narrow, dry, devouring attention, at the place just below her breastbone, where a pale small spinning pearl lay hidden in the dark of a lower abdomen. And something happened to the thin porcelain face. It was not a smile. It was a thing that happened to the corners of the mouth, a small, fierce, involuntary tightening, as though a thing that had been held hard for a very long time had slipped, by the width of a hair.

"Core Formation," she said.

"Yes, Master."

"In two months."

"I had... assistance."

"I see that you did." The gray eyes did not move. "Give me your hand."

Ji Ling’er held it out.

The old woman took it between her own two small, dry, hard, blue-veined hands. She turned it over. She looked at the callus on the palm, and the faint white scar across the base of the thumb, and then, with a swift, hard, almost savage movement, she struck it across the knuckles with the flat of her fingernails, once, in the old way, as a teacher strikes the hand of a pupil who has made an error.

"You have been using the Flowing River Turn," she said.

"Yes, Master."

"You have been using it badly."

"Yes, Master."

"You have a flaw in the third pivot. You have always had it. It is a question of the left wrist." The dry voice was perfectly flat. "I should have corrected it. I did not. I thought, she will find it. She will find it herself, or she will not, and if she does not, she is not worth the trouble." The hands tightened. "I was wrong."

Ji Ling’er stared at her.

"I have been wrong," said Madam Bai, "a great many times, in the last two months. It is a very disagreeable sensation. I am too old to enjoy it." And she drew her pupil, quite suddenly, with a hard jerk of the arm, into an embrace that had very little tenderness in it and a great deal of something else, and held her there, rigid, for as long as it takes to draw a single breath.

She let go.

"There," she said. "That is over. We shall not speak of it." She stepped back, and smoothed her white sleeve. "I have come a very long way. I should like some tea."

She took it in the garden, in a little pavilion among the pines, alone with Li Xuan.

She would have no one else. She had sent her disciples into the house, and Ji Ling’er after them with a single flat glance, and Gu with another. She sat on a stone bench, quite upright, with the gray sword laid across her knees and her small hands folded on it, while he knelt on the gravel and made tea, with the copper stove between his knees, and said nothing.

She watched him do it.

It took a long time. She did not speak. The pines murmured. A little way off, on the cliff-edge of the garden, the lights of the golden city came out one by one in the dusk, and, below them, the white sea of mist lay motionless under the stars.

He poured the tea.

She took the cup in both hands, and held it for a while, quite still, not drinking, and looked at it. Then she looked at him. The cold gray eyes were very bright and very sharp, and not at all unkind.

"You are the one who scratched the sixth diagram," said Madam Bai.

"I did."

"With a thumbnail."

"I had no brush."

"It is the finest correction of the Submerged Dragon that has been made in four hundred years." She said it flatly, as a woman states a price. "I took the copy that she brought home and put it under glass. My own master, who is dead, could not have done it. I have been wondering for two months who in the world could." She drank, slowly, and set down the cup. "I had a guess. I did not like the guess. And so I came to see."

"I am only a clerk, Madam."

"You are the Tenth."

The pines murmured.

He did not say anything. He knelt on the gravel with the kettle in his hands, perfectly still, and looked at the small old woman in white, and a very small cold feeling went down his back.

"I did not know that it would be a boy," she said, rather absently. "I thought, perhaps, a man. A tall one. With a beard. I have been picturing a beard for fifty years." Her mouth twitched, very slightly. "It is a mortification."

"Madam..."

"Do not call me that. I am not your elder." She turned her head, and met his eyes, and held them. "I am your guard."

He said, "I beg your pardon?"

"It is a very old office." The dry voice was quite level. "It is the oldest in the south. When the Founder’s brother laid down his brush, there were nine who swore to guard the Pages, and one who swore to guard the Reader. The nine were the Custodians. The one was the Frost." She touched the gray sword. "The Feathered Frost Sect was not made to teach swordsmanship, boy. It was made to wait. Seven hundred masters, in unbroken line, have sat upon that mountain and kept the road open for a man who had not come." The thin lips curved. "I am the seven hundredth. I did not think that it would be me."

The lamps of the city went on lighting, far below.

"And my pupil?" said Li Xuan, softly.

"She knew nothing. I told her nothing. I have never told anyone." The old eyes did not flicker. "I sent her to Great Liang because I had heard a rumor about a cellar, and a broom, and I wished, very much, for someone to look at it, who was not me."

"You wrote to her, a sword that has seen the sea."

"I did."

"And you did not say what you meant."

"I did not know what I meant." Her thin face did not change. "I only knew that I had waited fifty years, and that when a thing finally arrives that one has been waiting for, it is usually a good deal more frightening than one has supposed." She drew a breath. "I wished to be wrong. I did not like the thought of her standing near."

He was silent.

"And she stood," said Madam Bai.

She said it very quietly.

"She stood in a road. In front of a Nascent Soul. With a sword. For a boy in a cellar who she thought was nobody." The dry voice was almost inaudible. "I did not teach her that. I did not know that it could be taught."

He poured her another cup of tea.

She took it, and held it, and looked into it for a long time. Then she said, in a different voice, flat and brusque and businesslike, the voice of a woman who has been in too many councils to waste an evening on sentiment:

"The hearing is in two days. You will be asked to give up the Third Page. You will say no. They will offer you a great deal, and you will say no again. And then Jiang Heng will do what he does, which is to count the votes." She set down the cup. "He has seven. He needs five. He has had them for a decade. He does not need to buy them any more. They are owned."

"And the Frost?"

"The Frost owes the Jiang Clan the whole of its jade mine. It has done for forty years." Her mouth was a thin hard line. "It is not a thing that I am proud of. When I took the mountain, there had been a famine, and the old master had sold the mine to pay for rice. I thought that I would buy it back. I have been saving, for forty years." A very faint, very bleak, very dry amusement crossed the fine old face. "I have about nine hundred taels."

"It is a good deal less than the mine."

"It is a little less than a hundredth part."

He was quiet. And then, because the Eye would not be silent, and because he had been looking at the thin old woman’s thread for the last quarter of an hour, he said, very gently, as one speaks to a person who is not sure that she wishes to be told:

"Madam Bai. I do not think that the Frost owes the Jiang Clan anything at all."

She went absolutely still.

"There is a thread," he said. "From your chest. A very thick one. It does not go to the Jiang Clan. It goes the other way. It runs a very long way. It is not black. It is... quite silver." He lifted his eyes. "It goes to a mine."

The cold gray eyes did not move.

"The Jiang Clan does not own it," said Li Xuan. "I think that they have never owned it. I think that your old master sold it for rice, and that the buyer paid in notes. And I think," he said, with great gentleness, "that the notes have been altered, in exactly the same way as ours."

The old woman did not speak.

She did not move. She sat there in the dusk, with her small hands folded upon the gray sword, a thin white figure in the pines, and for the space of perhaps ten breaths, nothing in her face changed at all.

Then a single tear ran down the side of the fine porcelain cheek, and dropped, without a sound, on the white silk of her knee.

"Forty years," said Madam Bai, in a whisper.

He did not answer.

"I have lived on a mountain for forty years," said the Master of the Feathered Frost, "in a house that I thought I did not own. I have not bought a new robe. I have not built a new hall. I have eaten rice and radishes. I have saved." Her voice was quite level. It was only that her hands, on the scabbard, were shaking. "Do you know what I should like to do, Reader?"

"I think that I do."

"I should like," said the old woman, in the voice of a girl, "to put out his eyes."

He poured her another cup.

She took it. She drank it, in one swallow, as a soldier drinks, and set it down with a click, and sat for a time looking out across the cliff-edge of the garden at the golden lights, and the dark, and the milk-white sea of mist under the stars.

"Two days," said Madam Bai at last.

"Yes."

"I shall vote with you."

"You will lose your sect."

"I have never had a sect." The thin lips curved, a little, in a smile as brief and bright and bitter as a flash of ice. "I have had a mountain, and a promise, and a girl. I should like to see what is left when the debts are paid." She rose, small and white and straight in the lamplight, with the gray sword in her hand. "Do you know, boy, I think that I am going to enjoy this."

She went away between the pines, a little white figure, quite alone, without a backward glance.

And as he watched her go, with the cold wind in his face and the tea going cold at his knee, he saw one more thing, quite clearly, at the very edge of the Eye’s soft light. It was a very thin line. It ran from a window of the Pavilion, where a girl in a gray traveling robe stood watching with her hand pressed to her mouth. It ran across the dark garden, and the white gravel, and the pines, and joined, with a small bright silver click, a thread that ran from the middle of the old woman’s back.

They were the same color.

He did not say anything. He turned, and put out the stove.