Everything Under the Heavens (Silk and Song) Read Free Page A

the cropped head made the slender stem of her neck look even more fragile rising up from the folds of her white tunic. There was almost no flesh remaining on her body. Her skin was translucent, her cheekbones prominent beneath it. Her tiny hands looked like paper over sticks.
    He cleared his throat gently.
    She turned her head to look at him, and he saw with a pang that she seemed somehow much older.
    He bowed. “You see before you one Wu Hai, your father’s most unworthy friend. Do you remember me?”
    She inclined her head, her expression grave. “Of course I do, uncle,” she said, giving him the correct honorific with the precisely correct emphasis and intonation. Again like her father, he thought, she had a facility for any language, her tongue adapting readily from Mongol to Mandarin.
    “I am sorry I was away from home for so long,” he said.
    “My mother is dead, uncle,” she said.
    “To our loss and great sorrow,” he said.
    “And my father is gone.”
    “This, too, I know,” he said.

    “What will you do with her?” Bayan said before they left.
    Wu Hai looked down at Shu Ming’s tearstained face, asleep on his shoulder. “I have a son,” he said.
    “Ah,” Bayan said, a thoughtful hand stroking his mustaches. “Have you given any thought to what your family will say?”
    “I have no other family,” Wu Hai said.
    Bayan said no more.

    Wu Hai returned to his home and turned everyone in the house into the street with what they had on their backs, wife and servants all, with the sole exception of his son.
    His wife sobbed and groveled at his feet. “Where will I go, husband? What will I do?”
    Before them all he deliberately put the sole of his foot against her shoulder and shoved her through the gate. She rolled and rose to her feet, the lacquer on her face running in great rowels down her cheeks. “You had a wife!” Her voice rose to a scream. “What need had you of another!”
    “She had a husband,” Wu Hai said. He surveyed the throng of people gathered around her. Not one of them could meet his eyes. He remembered the delicate features and the gentle disposition of his friend’s wife, brutalized and despoiled and then destroyed, from nothing more than petty jealousy.
    “I have no wife,” he said, raising his own voice so that it would be heard over the sobs and wails of the people who had once formed his household. So they would understand fully the price of betrayal, he himself closed the heavy wooden doors in their faces. The bar dropped inexorably into its brackets with a loud and final thud.
    He turned to face his son.
    Wu Li was a sturdy and handsome fellow, standing with his legs braced and his thumbs in his belt in imitation of his father. He met Wu Hai’s eyes squarely, although his face was a little pale.
    “Do you understand what happened here, my son?” Wu Hai said.
    The boy hesitated, and then nodded once, firmly. “I do, father.”
    “What, then?”
    Unflinching, the boy said steadily, “There is no excuse for betraying a guest in one’s home.”
    Wu Hai’s wife had been an unaffectionate and inattentive mother. He nodded. “It is well,” he said.

    He sold the house for an extortionate price to one of Temur’s new-minted nobles and built a new home on property he owned outside of the city. It sat on the banks of the Yalu, and he built a dock and warehouses there as well, which, once Temur’s policies allowed the realm to recover from the economic instability caused by the ruinous wars of his grandfather, proved to be a profitable move.
    The first ceremony conducted beneath the roof of the new house was the marriage of his son, Wu Li, 9, to Shu Ming, 5. The marriage was in name only until both children had come of age, but in the interim it gave Shu Ming rank and citizenship, entitled to all the rights and at least the outward respect of the citizens of Everything Under the Heavens.
    Temur was an enlightened ruler who appointed people to positions of