Chapter 40 of 90
Bai Linglong’s Choice
"I…" Bai Linglong shook her head. "I can't do it. I'm only a weak woman. How could I possibly do something like that?"
"No." Li Yuguo's voice was firm. "You're strong. Stronger than anyone. I looked into you, Miss Bai. You were a village chief's daughter. Born into a family of scholars. And to find your brother, you were willing to swallow humiliation and carry a burden that would have crushed most men. With a will like that, you're already above everyone else."
He paused.
"If I could, I'd find those ledgers myself. But Li Yutang is too careful. He's wary of everyone around him—including the ones closest to him. Especially them." He looked at her steadily. "He obviously has plenty of money. And yet in three years, he's never once offered to buy you out. Can't you see what that means?"
She could. She had seen it for a long time. She had only never let herself look.
Her breathing slowed. Her shoulders steadied a little.
"I can try," she said at last. "But… how do I get in touch with you?"
"Me."
The King of Thieves stepped forward. Bai Linglong flinched; she had not even noticed him standing there.
"There's a little flowerpot on the windowsill outside your room," said Guan Yunfan. "Orchids. You take care of it yourself."
She stared at him. "How do you—"
"If you have anything to tell us," he went on, ignoring the question, "write it down. Wrap it in oil paper and hide it under the soil, at the bottom of the pot. Then tie a white ribbon around the outside. I'll see it, and I'll come and take your letter."
"All right," said Bai Linglong, without a moment's hesitation.
Her eyes had changed. All the cold, distant sorrow that had lived in them was gone. What had replaced it was fury. Her brother had been her reason to live. Now that reason was gone, and she would do anything—anything—to avenge his blood.
She lifted her head slowly and looked at Li Yuguo.
"Li Yuguo," she said. "You seem very different from before."
"Really?" Li Yuguo clasped his hands behind his back, and smiled faintly.
"If you have to wear a mask," he said, "then you'd better know clearly who you are underneath it. That's all. The only thing you have to be careful of is not to wear the mask too long. Otherwise it grows into your face. And then the false becomes true, and you can never take it off again."
She looked at him for a long time.
He did not know which of them he had been talking about.
"All right," he said, and stepped back. "Let's end it here. You've been gone a while already. If Zhang Ma notices anything, it'll be bad. She's a mercenary woman. For money, she'll sell anything that can be sold. Even you."
"I know," said Bai Linglong slowly.
She pulled her hood forward. Then she turned to him, and folded her hands, and bowed. A full, deep, formal bow, the kind a scholar's daughter is taught as a child.
"Master Li," she said. "Thank you."
He did not stay.
Guan Yunfan would see to the boy—a proper grave, on the hillside above the mound, with a stone. Li Yuguo had already paid for it. He turned and walked away through the bones with the King of Thieves on one side and Jun Xue on the other, and did not look back at the woman kneeling beside the straw mat.
"What do we do next?" Jun Xue asked, when they had reached the road. Her voice was very small.
"Almost time," said Li Yuguo. "It's time to do something for the common people."
He looked up at the sky.
It was overcast, heavy with dark cloud. But he knew that behind the clouds, the sun was shining as brightly as it ever had. It was only that the clouds were so thick, so low and so heavy, that they had blocked it out completely. They made the whole earth look gray and lifeless.
And then, as he watched, a gap opened in the clouds.
A single shaft of sunlight slipped through and fell slanting across the city wall in the distance, turning the old stones gold.
It did not look very far away at all.
"The City Lord's Mansion is hiring workers!"
Jun Xue stood on an upturned crate beside the city gate, her white hair blowing in the wind, and cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted as loud as her thin little body could shout.
"Hiring workers! One dou of flour a day! Sign up quick! Only a hundred people!"
For a moment, nobody moved.
Then the area around the gate boiled over.
"What? Did I hear that right? A dou of flour a day?"
"Wait—isn't that the maid who follows the King of Soft Rice around? Is this some kind of joke?"
"Joke or not, what do we lose? We won't lose a piece of meat by going to see! And if it's true—a whole dou of flour, every day!"
People were running in from the lanes. Old men, young men, women with babies on their backs. Thin faces, sunken eyes, cracked lips. In a few moments the whole square in front of the gate was packed, shoving, shouting.
The King of Thieves stood beside Li Yuguo at the edge of the crowd, masked. "Brother," he said doubtfully. "Is this really going to work?"
"If we want to pull Nalan City out of the mud," said Li Yuguo, "the first step is making sure the people have enough to eat."
He walked forward. A simple wooden platform had been knocked together beside the gate that morning, and it was already surrounded on every side.
When the people saw who was climbing onto it, every face changed.
Contempt. Pure, open contempt.
"Look! The King of Soft Rice is here!"
"I knew it. He's making fun of us. Nonsense! Let's go…"
"Yeah. How could there be such a good thing in the world? Everyone knows the City Lord's Mansion is poor as a temple rat. Why would they suddenly start caring whether we live or die?"
Li Yuguo heard every word. He did not argue.
Instead, he walked to the edge of the platform where two big sacks stood waiting, untied the neck of one, plunged a gourd scoop into it, and lifted it up. Flour. Fine and white, spilling over the edge of the scoop in a soft pale stream, puffing up in a little cloud in the wind.
"Of course it's not free," he said loudly. "I'm not giving away flour for nothing. You'll work for it. Starting today, the city is going to reclaim the wasteland ten li outside the walls. We're going to turn it back into farmland."
A big man at the front of the crowd shoved his way forward. He was rawboned and sunburnt and filthy, with a farmer's thick hands.
"Fine!" he said. "Then give me a dou first!"
He pulled a sackcloth bag out of his belt and held it open.
Li Yuguo filled it without a moment's hesitation. One scoop, two, three—a full dou—and then he kept going.
"You're the first," he said. "So you get one dou, and another one on top."
The man looked down at the burlap bag filling slowly in his hands. His whole body began to tremble.
He grabbed a fistful of flour and stuffed it into his mouth and licked it off his palm, white powder all over his beard and his chin.
"It's really flour," he said hoarsely. "It's real!"
The crowd exploded.
"Gods, there really is such a good thing!"
"Only a hundred people—I'm going, I'm signing up too!"
"Don't push! Hey! Don't push, I said don't push—my pants are coming off!"
They surged forward. Someone fell. Someone climbed over someone else. Elbows flew.
"Queue!" Li Yuguo bellowed over the top of them. "Line up! Anyone who cuts the line gets no flour!"
It took a while. But they lined up.
After a while, both sacks were empty, and a hundred people with flour in their bags were standing around the platform, staring at the King of Soft Rice as if he had grown a second head. And then Li Yuguo climbed down, and led them out of the gate, and down the road, to the wasteland ten li from the walls.
It was a sorry sight. Cracked earth, gray scrub, stones. An old irrigation channel ran along one side of it, half silted up and bone-dry. Nothing had grown here for years.
If it was going to be farmland again, it needed water. So the first step was to open the ditches—to dig out the old channels, and cut new ones, and bring the water in from the river.
Li Yuguo had already prepared the seeds. All kinds of them—millet and wheat and beans and sweet potatoes, things that grew fast and asked for little, bought by the sack from Alimama and stored in his bracelet. As long as the water came through, reclaiming this land would not be a problem. And then the food problem would begin to solve itself.
But it was a long-term plan. It would take months before the first harvest.
He stood on the edge of the dry ditch with his sleeves rolled up and watched the hundred of them start digging.
"Brother," said Guan Yunfan quietly, beside him, "the food alone is going to cost fifty taels a day. If you keep this up… that's a lot of money."
"I know," said Li Yuguo. "But it's better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish."
The King of Thieves was silent for a moment.
"Madam treats you like that," he said at last. "Honestly, brother—with your ability, I think you could stand on your own. You don't have to stay under her roof."
"She…"
Li Yuguo looked out over the dry fields, at the backs of the diggers bending and straightening, at the dust rising in the flat gray light.
"She's fierce," he said. "But she's not a bad person. Not in her heart."
He was thinking of the end of the original book. Of the last page of the Nalan City arc. When the bloody storm broke over the walls and the city burned and everyone else fled—everyone—Nalan Meng had not. She had not abandoned Li Yuguo, even then. Even when he was useless, and drunk, and dying. Even after he was already dead. She had stood over his body on the wall with her great sword in her hands and fought to the very end, until she had nothing left, and died of exhaustion where she stood.
"She's not a villain," he said again, quietly.
What Li Yuguo did not know was that Nalan Meng was not far away.
She was hiding behind the trunk of an old dead locust tree at the edge of the field, in her plainest gray robe, with her hair pinned up under a scarf. She had heard about the flour at the gate within the hour—half the city had heard—and she had come to see for herself, telling herself it was only to make sure he had not done something stupid.
She had heard every word.
Her face had gone hot. Very hot. She pressed both hands over her cheeks and cursed inwardly.
That bastard. Saying such embarrassing things. And so naturally, too, as if it were nothing at all. Shameless!
She turned to leave.
But she could not help glancing back at him one more time. At the soft-faced man standing on the edge of the dry ditch with his sleeves rolled up and dust on his boots, watching a hundred starving people dig.
Her lips twitched. She murmured, so softly that only the dead tree could hear:
"Master… it seems Yuguo really has changed…"
The reclamation went ahead in good order.
Three days later, Li Yuguo came out to inspect the fields as he had promised.
He heard it before he saw it. Not the steady chunk of hoes. Not the shouts of the overseers. Something else. A low, ragged sound of groaning.
He came over the rise, and stopped.
The fields were a mess. The new ditches had been half filled in again, the earth kicked back into them. Tools lay broken and scattered. The little tool shed had been knocked flat. And the people—his hundred workers—were sitting on the ground in the dirt, in twos and threes, holding their heads and their arms. Every one of them was hurt. Some had bloody noses. Some had split lips. One man's arm hung at a wrong angle. A woman was pressing a rag to a cut on her scalp, and the blood had run down over her ear.
Li Yuguo ran.
He went straight to a white-haired old man sitting at the edge of the nearest ditch, with a swollen eye and blood in his beard, and dropped to his knees beside him.
"Uncle Zhong," he said. "What happened here?"
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