Are You Zhang Lan?
"Yes. I am Zhang Lan. And who are you, madam, to come trampling through another house's gate?"
"Hmph. You've already heard who I am."
"Have I? The Lady Sun I know is wife to the Inspector of Yu Province and younger sister to the General of Chariots and Cavalry. Would a person of such rank truly conduct herself with so little courtesy?"
In the Romance she is the pure-hearted heroine who shares a true love with Liu Bei. In actual history, Lady Sun was little more than the watcher Sun Quan had fastened to his side.
She went about with a sword openly at her hip. She traveled with armed maids in her train. Of late I had even heard she had raised an entirely new stronghold, simply so she might live apart from him.
She was bound to break with Liu Bei in the end, and I was the one who would remain with him. I saw no reason to tread carefully.
Lord's wife or not, I had just told her to her face that I knew no one so rude. Lady Sun's expression crumpled. The click of her tongue carried all the way to where I stood.
I was just thinking she had more composure than I had expected—she was not, at least, flying into a full rage—when her mouth opened.
"I had heard of a heroine who took the field in a woman's body while still a child and met enemy generals blade to blade. And what do I find? Nothing but one little ink-stained brat. They say Zhang Fei's daughter was born with a hero's spirit, a tigress worthy of the tiger—but now that I have seen the daughter, I know his fame for an empty name, though I have never once watched Zhang Fei fight."
That crosses the line. I had brought family into it as well, but my point had been: your kin are extraordinary people, so why are you like this? I had lifted her house in order to cut her down.
Lady Sun's words used me as a pretext to smear my father's name.
Arrogant. I did not follow Zhang Fei with the whole heart of a trueborn daughter, but through Zhang Lan's memories and all I had lived since, I held him at least as a precious foster father. To hear him torn down to my face was deeply, intensely unpleasant.
Even so, I let the anger settle. Reason must always be kept cold. I called Zhang Fei's words back to mind.
And besides—if I were the one to explode first, would it not feel like losing the war of words? So I laughed.
"Ahahaha!"
"You laugh?"
"Your words, madam, are the very picture of a woman tilting her face to the sky and spitting. How could I help it?"
I pressed on before she could answer.
"You call it pedantry when someone addresses the person who has offered the discourtesy, so allow me to borrow Confucius."
In a single morning's rage, one forgets oneself,
and brings ruin even upon one's own kin.
Is that not delusion?
"What?"
"Consider Lady Wu, the Grand Lady, who brought to pass the marriage Sun the Caitiff-Destroyer had been refused. When Sun the Rebel-Queller passed the house on to the General of Chariots and Cavalry, he left his dying charge with Lord Zhang Zhao. How, then, is a person no hero merely for having cultivated learning and a ready tongue rather than the martial arts?"
A moment's fury, and one forgets oneself. And so one drags one's own kin down with one. Is that not delusion?
Grand, as befits a line from the Analects—but in plain speech it meant that if you talk so recklessly, your family eats the insult.
Read on through what followed, and the rest came out like this: if you mean to sneer at an ink-stain, then Zhang Zhao, the man your eldest brother entrusted your second brother to as he lay dying, is no hero either. Which would make your eldest brother, by your own measure, a man who could not even recognize one.
Dragging her mother into it may have been too far. But she had been the one to reach for fathers first.
One thing more. In later ages "hero" would shrink to mean little more than a man of matchless valor, but up through this time it simply meant a person of extraordinary quality. Even in the Mencius, where the word arises, it names those who come to propriety wholly on their own. Set beside a mere fighting man, the ink-stained scholar Lady Sun had mocked was, by any Confucian reckoning, the nearer thing to a hero.
In any case, she caught the barb under the words, and the tails of her eyes lifted. Small wonder Liu Bei felt a prick of fear whenever he shared her bed.
Her face twisted, and one of the maids—lost as to my meaning, but quick enough to read her mistress and guess—burst out in a shout.
"In whose presence do you dare such outrageous speech!"
"Enough."
The maid at Lady Sun's elbow flared and made to rush me. Lady Sun put out an arm and stopped her. Neither the motion nor the voice was large, yet the maid bowed her head at once.
"My lady, but..."
"I said enough."
"Yes... forgive me."
Listening to the pair of them—less a noblewoman and her maid than a general and her adjutant—I marked the form of address.
My lady. Ordinarily one said madam. That Lady Sun had not corrected it meant the title was of her own instructing. Just as I had thought: the marriage to Liu Bei did not sit well with her.
Liu Bei's eye for people was second to none; he could hardly have missed her heart. Even if she ran this instant to him or to Sun Quan and repeated what I had said, the blame would fall on her conduct, not on mine.
Perhaps she knew it. Her mouth twitched as she swallowed her temper, and she did not step over the last line.
"You are exactly like those old pedants they call the elders of Jiangdong. Nothing but a gloss of fine words. Quoting the dead—Confucius this, Mencius that—sayings the world scarcely understands, all to parade your learning. Enough. A wasted trip. We are leaving."
Even if I let it end here, the affair would live on as a tale that lifted me up: the girl who dealt a sharp rebuke to Lady Sun after she had forced her way into a house unasked.
The people of Jingzhou were already sick to death of Lady Sun's lawless ways. They would carry this story—the cold, clean draft that cut through all that stifled frustration—into every corner of the province.
But I had no intention whatsoever of ending it here.
"Where are you going? You came without the master's leave, and now you mean to go without so much as a farewell?"
Lady Sun stopped. Half-turned, she crooked her head to look back at me, and a different light passed through her eyes.
"Oh? A farewell?"
"Yes. In the Zhang household, we do not drive out even an uninvited guest without a greeting."
Only then did she come fully around, chin lifting a fraction. The jut of it—go on, then—was arrogance itself, and it suited that haughty face perfectly.
"Very well. And what sort of greeting is it? Shall I say, I shall withdraw now?"
"Hardly."
We were long past pressing our hands together and murmuring I'll be going and take care.
There was only one greeting left to us.
Lady Sun's eyes lit, and the corner of her mouth curled, fierce.
"A greeting of steel... now that is something."
When her mouth had drawn a full, clean arc—something one could actually call a smile—she took one step toward me.
"I like you."
Her hand went to the sword at her waist. But the fingers that had meant to close on the grip, worn smooth by long use, only checked and swept empty air.
"Still, how should the master offer the greeting while her people stand by? Mine I leave to my page."
"Is the handling of one's subordinates not itself the measure of one's skill?"
"Don't worry. You won't be complaining afterward that the greeting lacked sincerity."
A brawler to the bone, not a woman. Even "tomboy" was too pretty a word. Too violent to be called a heroine, and, seeing the way she carried herself, too grand and openhearted to be called a ruffian.
The displeasure of a moment ago was washed clean from her face. In its place I felt expectation, and with it a kind of hunger.
"Chubaek. Come out."
"Yes, my lady."
The page who answered was a girl about my own age. Like the maids who followed Lady Sun, Chubaek carried a blade—shorter than the ones the adults used, and slung across her back rather than hung at the waist.
"You will offer the greeting in my place."
In place of a demure bow, Chubaek answered with a crisp, formal salute and came striding over. I stood a full head above others my age, and even so she was not much shorter. A little smaller than I was, no more.
Lady Sun watched her step forward without a moment's hesitation, plainly pleased, and spoke as if showing her off.
"That child is the one in whom I place my greatest hopes. A very fitting opponent for a greeting of steel."
Well. Not bad. Her balance was sound, and the marks of hard training showed.
But I did not think Lady Sun cherished her merely because she overflowed with martial talent. The page called Chubaek was remarkably pretty for that alone to explain it. Backed as a prospect, she would of course have been supported in every way—and yet even allowing for that, skin so fair and smooth, and a nose so straight, drew the eye in an age like this.
I was studying her when Lady Sun clapped her hands all at once, as if something had just occurred to her.
"Yes. Each of us has pointed out the other's disappointment and discourtesy, so let us say that whoever finishes this greeting first is in the right. How does that sound?"
Beneath the proposal—that the winner of a spar dressed up as a greeting would be the one who was correct—I felt an unshakable faith in victory. Was the girl called Chubaek really so extraordinary?
It was plausible enough. In childhood, girls often shoot up faster than boys and outmatch them in strength besides. Chubaek had probably gone from win to win even against the boys of her own age.
At that brimming, confident offer, I smiled a gambler's smile where no one could see it.
"Very well."
I accepted without hesitation, and Lady Sun spoke again.
"That confidence is good to see. Then how about this? If your greeting comes late, you become my page."
I had to work to keep from laughing.
At the tables, a sharp deals the mark a good hand precisely so the mark can be eaten alive later. With a hand like this, you can win. Plant that certainty, and you lead them to lay a far larger stake.
This was the same thing. I had not particularly meant it so, but Lady Sun had set great store by the child called Chubaek, and when I came along so readily she raised the bet—without the least idea where it would lead.
"Then you've considered the other way around as well?"
"Oh? The other way. I hadn't thought that far. What did you have in mind?"
The arrogance of never once assuming defeat. The spirit she had from her father, and the gambler's streak with it, would one day carry a plot to seize Liu Shan almost all the way to success—and then fail, because she had taken her opponent too lightly.
I set my thoughts in order, and then I spoke.
"You mean to take me for a page, so I, in turn, will send your maids home. Deliver them to the General of Chariots and Cavalry."
"Don't you think the accounts fail to balance? You are one. My maids number a hundred."
"Because I am worth more than those hundred."
It was not a false claim. This was not Europe, where one carted off the daughters of noble houses to serve as maids. This was the last years of the Han, the age of the Three Kingdoms. Even if those maids were daughters of great clans, how noble could the blood really be?
I, by contrast, was the eldest daughter of Zhang Fei, a pillar of Liu Bei's army in both name and fact—and the woman both Liu Bei and Zhou Yu had wanted for a daughter-in-law.
Hm. Put that way, a strange pride rose in me, and a flicker of distaste along with it. The dissonance of still thinking of myself, stubbornly, as a man.
"But with no maids, who attends me? That I cannot grant."
I had never expected her to take it. From the first, Lady Sun was the watcher and the check that Sun Quan's side had sent. The maids were the means. Sending them home would mean failing the charge laid on her.
She'll refuse to have their weapons taken, too. Better, here, to choose the play that grows my name.
"Take this affair as a lesson, and henceforth keep the laws and the rites of Jingzhou."
"Is that all?"
"Yes."
"Good. And as a token that I will keep your condition, I give you that child for your page."
If I won, she would pin a watcher on me as a person to be watched? No matter. Lady Sun was not going to stay fastened to Liu Bei's side forever.
"Let us do that."