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“Well, why should I like it? Should a murdered girl only get revenge if she’s beautiful? What a cock the Shaking Earth Master must be if he’s going to sit on his ass in his fortress, refusing to move until he sees a lovely face and a trim pair of legs.”
“You sound just like Wei Jintai. She says it’s all about pity stirred in a cold heart and the triumph that can grow from compassion. I think it’s just another dead girl and another martial cock who’s too busy reading ancient scripts and lording it over the locals to do any good.”
“At Singing Hills, we do find that most of the women who make it into the archives and histories are called beautiful,” they said. “And in the stories at least, if a woman is not beautiful, then of course she must be ugly if she is there at all,” Sang said, rolling her eyes, but then Wei Jintai had dropped back to walk with them, clasping her arm around Sang’s waist.
“Fine, fine, I’m the prettiest teapot in Lady Chu’s collection, all right? I’m beautiful, I’m lovely, I’m a delicate flower, now, sis, put me down!”
Chih swallowed hard and nodded. They weren’t brave, and despite the shaved head and the indigo robes, they weren’t particularly virtuous, but more than anything else, they were curious, and sometimes that could stand in for the rest.
“If you are murdered in the night, I will tell the Divine that you died well and bravely.” “Thank you for always telling the nicest lies about me.”
“Yes. Sang was telling me some ugly woman stories, but she said that she didn’t know that one.” Khanh shook his head with a trace of disapproval. “What a rude thing to call them,” he said. “You scholars, you need boxes for every single thing.” “How else would we carry them?” asked Chih, and Khanh grunted in assent.
“But wild pigs, well. They were big enough that they got to be gods in the old days. One thing that makes you a god is killing a lot of people, and they surely did that. When foxes turn a hundred, they give the moon a skull and turn into humans, but when wild pigs turn forty, they’re big enough that the only thing they want to eat is meat.”
She was known to be kind, which you should never confuse with being gracious or beautiful or courteous.
“The world is built on who carries what and for who,” Chih said, settling the weight more comfortably on their shoulders. “It’s not a bad world where we carry presents for people who feed us.”
Chih didn’t spend very much time with children, but they lived in stories, and for a little while, they could invite the children of Betony Docks into the house they made, offering them the fragile shelter of a story they had all built together.
Chih suddenly found themself remembering Sang’s comment on the road, about ugly women and beautiful women. People were beautiful or ugly because other people said they were, and apparently Master Nie, who had been the Shaking Earth Master and Master See, had decided he liked being Beautiful Nie the best of all.
“There’s something you don’t see every day,” she said, and Chih shrugged. “Sometimes you get told about it,” they said thoughtfully. “Maybe you get told about it two or three times, and you just don’t know what you’re hearing.”
