3 – Zhi Lan
“T he audacity! The disrespect ! I’ll have that good for nothing thief hanged at the city gate!” Magistrate Bu’s face was as purple as a plum.
Master Dan and Zhi Lan sat awkwardly in the main hall, their heads lowered as the servants stood by in fearful silence. The parlor was lit by lanterns. Spots of yellow light reflected on the polished wooden floor, blinking out when the magistrate stormed over them in a swirl of dark robes.
“Calm down, my lord,” Lady Bu said in a placating tone. “The constables will find him in due time.”
“What do you know, woman?” Magistrate Bu spat, waving his hand as if his wife was a pesky fly. He resumed pacing, scowling at the maidservant who entered to bring in a tray of tea. She cowered and scampered away.
Zhi Lan couldn’t believe how quickly things went south. Not thirty minutes ago she’d been admiring the courtyard and dreaming of a promising future.
“ My manor, broken into by a common thief!” Magistrate Bu threw his arms down, the fabric of his massive sleeves snapping harshly behind him. “My masterpiece, gone!”
Master Dan clasped his hands respectfully as he addressed the magistrate. “If I may be so bold to say, my lord, it is only a painting. I am more than capable of creating another piece for you, as many as you desire as long as I am under your patronage.”
Magistrate Bu narrowed his eyes. A dangerous sort of silence pervaded the room. The hairs on the back of Zhi Lan’s neck stood up.
“This isn’t about you, Li Chen,” the magistrate hissed. “I have shown that painting to everyone of importance. They will expect me to have it back. How can I let a mere thief cheat me?”
Zhi Lan wasn’t overly familiar with the ways of officials, but she knew that a magistrate was meant to enforce justice and arrest thieves and robbers. If they were unable to catch a criminal, it would be a demerit, a mark on their record. If they failed frequently, they would be dismissed.
Magistrate Bu was not only risking losing face. He was risking his position.
Master Dan bowed again. “Surely, my lord, it is no fault of your own—”
“I intend to have that painting back, one way or another,” Magistrate Bu said. “You will make me a duplicate. I will give you three days.”
Zhi Lan glanced up, startled. Master Dan looked at a loss for words.
“What’s this? Are you hesitating?”
Master Dan bowed. “It’s an unusual request, for those in my line of work, my lord. I am not a commercial painter. Furthermore, the original took me three months on site. I have no doubt that your lordship will be able to find the thief—”
“I have paid and provided for you, Dan Li Chen. If you can’t copy a mere painting you can hang with that thief for all I care!”
Zhi Lan froze. Surely the magistrate wasn’t serious.
“As you wish, my lord. My student and I will begin working immediately,” Master Dan said evenly.
“Get out of my sight,” the magistrate snarled.
With a low bow, Master Dan took Zhi Lan’s arm and hurried out the hall.
***
Z HI LAN’S HEART WAS still pounding by the time the servants guided them into their rooms. They were housed in the west wing of Magistrate Bu’s massive courtyard manor. Both of them had a lavishly furnished suite to themselves, but Zhi Lan followed Master Dan into his, bracing herself for a sleepless night. The magistrate’s threat rung in her ears, making her sick to her stomach. She couldn’t help but feel partially responsible. After all, hadn’t she prayed for a distraction? Some passing immortal must have granted her wish. Or more likely a mischievous spirit, considering the circumstances.
But it wouldn’t do to admit this to Master Dan. Especially not if she had to reveal the reason she wanted the distraction in the first place.
No, it was better to keep that to herself.
“I suppose we should begin,” Master Dan said with a sigh.
He seated himself at a mahogany table supplied with paper, brushes, and an inkstone. Zhi Lan went to light the candles.
The room was far larger than any room she’d stayed in before, with a study area on a raised platform, a sitting area, and a sleeping area complete with an alcove bed. She would’ve loved to explore the place if she weren’t so anxious.
Master Dan gestured to his trunks which were set before the desk. “The silk.”
Zhi Lan retrieved a bolt of plain white silk, unrolling it to the appropriate length. They worked in silence, cutting the silk to size, then priming it with a liquid mixture of glue and alum with a wide brush. They then spread it on a board, waiting for the sticky substance to dry—only then would the silk be ready to take ink. Zhi Lan had been fascinated when Master Dan first showed her this process. She had done it many times since. Now, she found some comfort in its ritualistic familiarity.
Master Dan regarded the drying silk with a contemplative air. The only sign of his distress was the deep crease between his white brows.
“Shall we try it on paper first?” Zhi Lan piped up. “I think I remember the composition well enough.”
He dipped his head in acquiescence.
Silk paintings usually started with a line drawing on paper. The artist would then place the primed silk on top and trace over the drawing with a fine brush. But Master Dan had felt spontaneous on the day they went to Shui Jin Mountain, so he painted directly on the silk. As a result, there was no paper sketch that he could retrace. They really had to start from scratch.
Zhi Lan and Master Dan each took a sheet of paper from beneath a hefty paperweight. She dribbled some water into the inkstone beside it and began to grind with an ink stick. After a few moments of silence, broken only by the steady scraping of the inkstone, Master Dan took a brush and soaked its white bristles into the dark well.
“Well, my dear disciple, what do you think of this situation we’ve gotten ourselves into?” Master Dan said at last.
“Earning Magistrate Bu’s patronage? I think it’s an achievement, sir,” Zhi Lan said politely.
“You know what I’m speaking of.”
Zhi Lan rubbed her chin. “Very well. It’s terrible and we’re doomed.”
Master Dan laughed. “An accurate description.” He grew serious again, hovering his brush over the paper. “Is this what you want, child? To follow me city to city and work under the whims of bureaucrats?”
Master Dan was from an impoverished noble family that had fallen from grace after his late father had gambled away all their riches. He had cut ties with his family completely, opting for a nomadic artist’s life, living off one patron to another.
“Of course! I wouldn’t have begged for your tutelage otherwise,” Zhi Lan said.
She didn’t think that was such a bad life to live. She had first met Master Dan over a year ago, when she was still living in a remote farming village with her parents and brothers. He had been a traveler, seeking a great river to paint. Ma had taken one look at his white scholar’s robes and deemed him respectable enough to offer him temporary lodging. Zhi Lan had been endlessly curious—and delighted—to find that Master Dan was a painter. She was exceedingly fond of drawing herself, though she never had enough paper to indulge the hobby.
Master Dan had offered his supplies to let Zhi Lan demonstrate her skill. She had drawn one of her chickens, Pu’er, with black ink. Master Dan had subsequently let her use his colored pigments, which Zhi Lan dipped her brushes into eagerly, resulting in a chicken with ultramarine blue and cinnabar red feathers, though Pu’er was a primarily brown chicken.
“Overzealous with ink, perhaps, but a steady hand and a good sense of composition,” Master Dan had concluded. He had then let Zhi Lan look through his portfolio, which included a half-finished painting of a rocky landscape.
“I am looking for a river to go here,” Master Dan had said, tapping the empty bottom half of the painting. “Will you help me find one?”
The next day was the first of their many grand nature excursions. Zhi Lan had led Master Dan to the neighboring river they used to irrigate the farm. The current was strong that morning, throwing white foam against the rocks. She had helped Master Dan grind his inks and hovered over his shoulder as he created magic before her very eyes.
By evening, she had practically begged on her knees for him to accept her as his student.
Zhi Lan was brought back to the present when Master Dan sighed and set down his brush with a click. His paper was unmarked.
“I can’t help but think you’re meant to find your fortune elsewhere,” Master Dan said. He gestured to the lavish apartments around them. “This is an old bachelor’s life. I travel and paint to make a name for myself. I bend to the whims of my patrons. I have these rooms, but depend on another to provide them to me. Zhi Lan, you are young. This is as good a time as any to return home and get married. I won’t blame you if you leave.”
Magistrate Bu’s threat lingered over them, heavy yet unspoken.
“If I marry, I will have to bend to the whims of my husband and depend on him to provide my rooms. The situation isn’t much of an alternative, is it?” Zhi Lan said with a wry smile. “I’d much rather suffer with you, if I have to suffer at all. Besides, there is still much you need to teach me.”
Master Dan tsked. “Someone ought to teach you to curb that smart mouth of yours.”
“They can try.”
He didn’t laugh. “I’m getting old. I worry I will have nothing to leave you. No name, no legacy. Will you promise to go home after I’m gone, child? I don’t want you wandering about in this manner alone.”
“Master Dan, please don’t speak of such things!” Zhi Lan cried. “You have decades left to live. That’s plenty of time to make a name for yourself and turn this situation of ours around. We’ll solve this together.”
Master Dan merely sighed.
Zhi Lan picked up the brush he had set down, rewetted it with ink, and hovered the tip over her paper. “It was like this, yes?” She swept her brush upward, tracing the towering contour of Shui Jin Mountain.
***
I T WAS NEARING MIDNIGHT when Zhi Lan retired to her room, setting her shoes outside and donning her indoor slippers. The suite was connected to Master Dan’s and equally nice, featuring lush furniture and a vanity with a large bronze mirror. Pots of cosmetics were arranged on the table. She didn’t presume they were for her use, but she did peek in the red enameled containers out of curiosity before changing for bed and pulling the pins from her hair.
The alcove bed was covered in sky blue sheets, so large that she could roll over twice. It was a luxury compared to her own straw sleeping pallet at home and the hard, narrow beds of tea houses. Zhi Lan sighed, grateful at least for the promising comfort of a cozy night’s sleep.
After washing up with a basin of water, she sat before the mirror and began to comb her hair.
Before Master Dan had dismissed her, Zhi Lan attempted a few sketches of his Shui Jin Mountain painting. She couldn’t be sure if any of the iterations were correct, as Master Dan hadn’t commented on them. He had only thanked her for her efforts and told her to reconvene tomorrow.
She recalled the very first lesson Master Dan had taught her on her first day as his disciple. “Everything we paint must have a deeper meaning,” he had said. “There is symbolism to be found in every composition, in every rock, bird, and tree. To paint is to communicate. If one has nothing to say, there is no purpose in picking up a brush.”
With Shui Jin Mountain, Master Dan had wanted to capture the grand mysticism of the waterfall, juxtaposing the serenity of their early morning surroundings by the sheer power of the falls in the distance. He had captured an ephemeral moment.
Painting a mere replica went against the very reason Master Dan made art.
Zhi Lan was perturbed by his somber attitude and his talk of growing old and passing on. Death was on his mind. With the magistrate’s threat, she couldn’t blame him. But Zhi Lan was determined to help him turn this around. She wanted him to succeed. And selfishly, she didn’t want to go back home yet.
Her comb snagged in her hair. Zhi Lan frowned, staring at her reflection. The glimpses she had caught of herself in the past were always in pools of water, where the ripples distorted her features. She was dismayed to find that her shoulders were narrower than she thought they were, so unlike her brothers’ broad ones, as if a strong gust of wind could knock her over.
Ba used to joke that he had found her outside a rich family’s manor.
“My little orchid looks more like a lady than a farm girl,” he’d say to her affectionately. “Perhaps you are meant for greater things, Lan’er.”
Greater things. Like marriage.
Zhi Lan was nearing twenty. If she went back now, she knew her family would nudge her toward a match. Their farm was struggling, barely recovered from the previous years of drought and failed crops. Well-off in-laws would be a massive help. Yet she hated the idea of making her fortune by marrying. She wanted to support her family like her brothers did—through her own hard work—even if she knew she wasn’t useful on the farm in the way they were.
The only reason Ma and Ba had consented to Zhi Lan leaving with Master Dan was because he was kind enough not to charge tuition like a formal school would. Free education wasn’t something to pass up.
Zhi Lan eyed the ornamented containers on the vanity hesitantly, then plucked off the lid of a tin enameled with a peony. Within lay small rectangular sheets of vermilion-tinted paper. She wet her lips and brought a sheet between them, pressing gently.
Her reflection stared back with a red mouth. She had seen the girls in her village before their wedding processions, dressed in their best robes, their lips painted just like this beneath red veils.
A painted face was art, too. Just not the sort Zhi Lan preferred.
She capped the tin and rubbed her lips, suddenly not recognizing herself. The color was stubborn, however, and remained too bold and too vibrant on her skin.
Things like this always brought unwanted attention.
She looked away from the mirror and focused on working the snag out of her hair, a frown furrowing her brow. Color, like beauty, faded. Skill could only grow.
A loud thump sounded from the roof. Zhi Lan jumped, dropping her comb with a clack. She waited a second, then two. Silence. Slowly, she let herself relax. Perhaps it was just a loose branch that had fallen.
Zhi Lan tossed her hair back and padded past the silk screen that separated the sleeping area from the sitting area, intending to blow out the dim candle on the table.
She did not expect to run headfirst into a tall, shadowed mass.
Zhi Lan gasped and stumbled back.
A man loomed over her, dressed in black from the toes of his scuffed boots to the scarf tied around the lower half of his face.
“Don’t scream,” the man said.
Zhi Lan screamed.
And was abruptly cut off when a large hand clamped over her mouth. An arm banded around her waist and lifted her from the ground. Zhi Lan struggled, gagging when she managed to inhale through his fingers. Skies, was that dirt and duck grease?
The man dumped her unceremoniously into her alcove bed, looming over the entrance so there was no escape. Zhi Lan scrambled to the corner, half frozen in fear. She managed to pelt him with her slipper. It bounced off his chest harmlessly.
“W-Who are you? What do you want?” she choked out.
“Be quiet and nothing will happen to you,” the man said. He had a surprisingly smooth voice. No doubt a trick to make her let her guard down.
Zhi Lan’s mind jumped to the magistrate’s threat. “Did Magistrate Bu hire you? I-I don’t want to die, I didn’t do anything wrong! My master and I are working on the painting as we speak. I promise we’ll—”
He climbed onto the bed, clamping his hand over her mouth again, and pinned her to the far wall with his body, his limbs hard and unyielding.
Zhi Lan squeaked, her eyes watering both from fear and his stench. Through the blur of her tears, she caught sight of his eyes. Pale, parchment beige with stark black pupils. Terrible demon’s eyes that she’d recognize anywhere.
It was the dirty thief who had stolen Master Dan’s painting.
Anger replaced her fear. Then, she was struck with a stupid thought. The thief in his horrible, dusty thieves’ clothes was on her clean bed , boots and all! How dare he!
“Hmmmph!” Zhi Lan said.
And skies, his fingers stank! Her brothers used to mess with her in the same way, pressing their dirty hands over her nose and mouth after they had spent hours doing farm work. Regretfully, there was only one way to repel them.
Without thinking, Zhi Lan stuck out her tongue and licked the thief’s palm.
“What are you—?”
He retracted his hand, scrunching his eyebrows as he stared at the shiny spot of saliva on his skin.
Zhi Lan spat the salty, greasy taste out of her mouth and gasped for air, though she only got a lungful of the thief’s scent, as he still hadn’t let go of her. He smelled like forest and sweat and smoke. And that horrible duck grease again. “Apologize!”
He stared.
“Apologize...right...now. This is no way to treat a woman, you horrible, smelly criminal!”
To her embarrassment, tears blurred her vision once more and her shoulders began to shake with sobs. She was tired and hungry and certainly did not want to fight for her life at the moment. Of course it was just her luck to have the thief who had started this series of unfortunate events come to her room and rob her of a good night’s rest along with everything else in her life.
“I...apologize. Please stop crying.”
The thief slowly released her and sat back on the bed, settling his hands on his knees. He was still blocking her escape, but at least he wasn’t manhandling her anymore. His eyes were terrifying, but they held no expression. No anger, no desire. They were strangely...blank.
Zhi Lan sniffled and wiped her eyes with her sleeves, unsure of what to make of this strange turn of events.
“What’s your name?” the thief said.
“N-Nong Zhi Lan.”
He nodded slowly. “A farmer’s name.”
“It is.” She swallowed and hugged her knees to her chest. “Are you here to steal more? I-I ought to call the guards on you.”
Those blank eyes studied her. “Tell me, Miss Nong, why does it matter to you if a rich magistrate becomes a little less rich?”
Zhi Lan raised her chin. If he was willing to philosophize with her, perhaps he possessed some gentlemanly qualities. “It doesn’t,” she said. “But my master and I are under Magistrate Bu’s patronage. That painting you stole is the sole reason we’re here. His lordship intended to add it to his collection. And now that it’s gone, he’s threatening to hang us! This is all your fault!”
Then she’d be dead. Or if Master Dan found some way to save her, she’d have to go back to her parents in the village with nothing to show for her efforts. Her brothers would tease her relentlessly for her failed pursuits and she’d be a burden to Ma and Ba. She’d be too weak to be useful around the farm and too proud to make money by any other means but her own. She’d mourn Master Dan and wish she could’ve done something for him—anything.
This miserable train of thought brought fresh tears to her eyes.
“I don’t see how the magistrate’s bad temper is my fault,” the thief said.
Zhi Lan scowled. Perhaps he was not so gentlemanly after all. “We might die without that painting!”
The thief blinked slowly. “Then you ought to find a more practical line of work.”
Her face heated. “You’re one to talk, you petty thief!”
“Mine is a lucrative field,” he said calmly. “What good are artists and scholars? You wear the same white robes and wax poetic about ridiculous things. A painting from one master is indistinguishable from the next. You paint the same mountains, the same birds. You find meaning where there is none. At the end of the day, art is for thieves like me to profit from, and for the rich to feel superior.”
Zhi Lan grabbed her other slipper and flung it at him.