David
David discovered that fifty li was two hours at a brisk walk. The road was not well maintained - they lost the path through the undergrowth more than once. But luck would have it that they always found the road again within minutes. The road meandered around trees and hills and avoided the denser parts of the forest. As long as they followed the gentle slope downwards, they would reach the water.
Good fortune struck again when they rounded what must have been the seventieth bend in the road, and were abruptly confronted by the sights and sounds of Sky River. The afternoon tide looked gentle but the short wooden pier and the proximity of a merchant ship docked at its edge told a different tale.
The merchant ship looked the smallest it could possibly be. A pair of masts with wide, white sails adorned her, just shy the height of three men. Judging from the way a figure on the ship paced on the deck, ten people on board would struggle to stand a wingspan apart. The ship's rigging was meticulous and symmetrical.
Past the small ship was a vast expanse of river. David wasn't sure if he could have seen the opposite shore before he had met the lightning. It was very far. The pier, which gave no help in estimating the relative distance from shore to shore, was obviously maintained by the trading post that hovered behind it. Zhou had mentioned the trading post as a landmark.
The trading post was a grotesque creature of wood on stilts. These stilts were moored deeply, David assumed, like the round wooden piles which anchored the dock into the ground. It was an innovation which allowed the structure to survive when the river flooded.
Like its legs, the trading post was built of wood. Shoddily made planks had been nailed into rudimentary stairs that led to its door. It had a single large window over the door, covered from within by a sheet of what looked like wax paper, which faced away from the river.
With the trading post in shouting distance, Alice felt the need to fish the coin purse out of her robes to check its contents.
They had run into enough trouble in the last few days that David felt an immediate spike of worry when she gave a startled gasp.
"This is impossible," she said, staring into the coin purse. She raised it to eye level as if she were measuring the length of it against her face, then placed it flat in her hand. The coin purse was roughly woven in a red cloth David could not identify immediately. It ran lengthwise from knuckle to wrist and spanned four of Alice's fingers, fitting neatly onto her palm. A single metal button held the purse shut - dull in color from casual use.
David looked at Alice in askance. "What's so special about it?"
"It's bigger on the inside than on the outside."
David and Alice had been dealing with the impossible since they'd arrived into this world, but the inherent clash of logic in her words still gave him cause to blink rapidly.
Neither spoke as she closed the purse, shutting its mouth by slipping the button through the hole. Alice shook the purse. There was the faint sound of jingling that came from the purse - a disassociated noise that defied reason as it was both faraway and implied more coins than it could have possibly held.
After brief examination, David realized that the purse looked completely empty - it did not show a single indication that there was any coin within at all. If he had given it a second thought when Zhou handed it to Alice, his surprise would have caused problems.
Alice shook the purse with more vigor.
"Stop that," David said. "You're going to blend the mulberries."
"No I'm not." Alice snapped, then popped the button open again and held it towards him so he could take a look. The early afternoon sun found its way into the purse easily, revealing that the bag of soft, tarnished coins that were rectangular in shape. They were known as taels and the bag was half-way full of them. Alice had mentioned in the temple that each coin contained fifty grams of silver.
There was a small box inside that was similar in color to the cloth of the bag. David assumed it contained the mulberries.
The box, sitting atop the sea of silver, sat at a depth under where the bag should have ended.
"They just had these bags laying around?" David wondered.
Alice had another view of the situation. "How many 'empty' cloth bags like this do you think we must have thrown aside in the Falling Leaves sect?" She looked miserable, but it was only momentary. "And we were thinking of cutting the mattresses open.
"You were thinking of cutting the mattresses open. Did you think the Daoists of a temple as old as time would be hoarders as if they were grannies who lived through the Great Depression" David said, crossing his arms. Alice grinned at him.
"How much do you think is in there?"
In response, David stuck his hand into the bag and dug through the taels until he hit cloth. His arm was submerged a third of the way to his elbow.
"This much?" There wasn't anything wrong with David's depth perception, but this was an optical illusion that was neither just optical nor an illusion.
"I'm just going to assume that it's enough for us to get to Red Wind Sect comfortably. So at least enough to sit down in a restaurant and stay a few nights in various inns along the way."
Alice smirked. "Do you think this might have been Young Master Lin's allowance?"
The mundane nature of this unabashedly magical bag pulled both of them into another contemplative silence until Alice closed the bag again and put it back into her robe. She grabbed onto David's wide, silken sleeves but it was he who guided her to the entrance of the trading post.
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As they approached the rickety stairs, they heard the sound of shouting from within. There was no true vitriol to the voice, but the anger was unmistakable.
"And if you think that I'll pay two taels for a bag of rice you stepped in, you're out of your mind!" The speaker's voice was rough and deep. His rapid hybrid of several dialects of Chinese did not match the drawl in his accent. Despite the whiplash of trying to translate the exact words in his head, the overall meaning was quite clear.
The door thudded loudly and shook against its frame.
David and Alice stared at one another.
"Your rotten dead crab mother-" the voice seethed. Now that particular string of apoplectic rage was all in Cantonese. The corners of Alice's lips lifted slightly as she threw a glance his way, showing her dimples.
It appeared that an old enemy - doors which only opened in a single direction, had followed them here.
A swarthy, thickset man threw the door open with a bang and yelped in surprise, skidding to a halt just two inches from David's nose. He glared at David, reddening slightly in embarrassment. The man had a barely maintained beard and mustache combination. The coarse black hairs ended right under his throat in a curtain. His hair was unkempt, nearly reaching his shoulders. His well-worn, muted blue robes were similar in design to what David wore, but barely fit his wide shoulders. The hem hung too far above his ankles. His shoes, made of some nondescript animal hide, seemed new.
"What are you looking at?" The glare intensified.
Alice rolled her eyes and pushed past him without answer dragging David along.
The trading post was slightly too warm. Three walls were lined by burlap sacks - undoubtedly full of rice. A counter, crafted from the same wood as the building, reached waist height and ran parallel to the wall opposite the entrance. Large, open pewter jars of pickling vegetables lined up neatly along at its base.
Behind the counter sat a noticeably corpulent merchant armed with an oil lantern to his left and a tea set to his right. The tea set, made of that same earthen pewter, had a single cracked cup - for the merchant. Tea stains speckled his robes which had surely been white when the merchant was a young man.
Behind the merchant were more large jars stacked in a pyramid four jars high, each jar as wide as Alice's shoulders. Lengths of expertly tied twine held cloth coverings over the mouth of the jars. They were clearly marked with a word which was likely the same in all alternate versions of China. Wine.
Alice wrinkled her nose and took a step back. The pickles or the merchant stank. Perhaps both.
"How much further up north is the nearest city?" David asked the merchant.
"Ping'an is three hundred and eighty li from here," said the merchant, who didn't even glance at them. David had never seen anyone look more bored.
"And how far is the closest inn on the road to Ping'an?" asked Alice. She was already drifting towards the door.
The merchant looked up immediately when he heard Alice. His boredom morphed into an approximately helpful smile.
"Young miss, there's no way you'll make it to the next stop along the river until hours after dark. But for the price of a single tael you can set off from my humble trading post-"
"Sixty li north, there's a reputable inn at the point where the river makes an elbow. If you start walking now, you'll be done eating there before the sun sets." The trading post's previous customer had not left yet. It was an act of mercy - he was holding the door open. Beyond the door was fresh air.
David couldn't decide whether Alice or the man behind them was looking at the merchant with more disgust.
"Thank you," said Alice. She turned immediately and nearly shoved the man through the door in her haste to leave with David immediately behind her.
"Wait, you-" The door closed with a bang after they escaped, cutting off whatever the merchant was starting to say.
David allowed himself to breath through his nose again.
After they made it past the stairs, the thickset man looked from David to Alice and back.
"What are you looking at?" David returned to the man, with no heat. After stepping inside the trading post, he could see why the other had been so irritable - and the man had held the door open for them.
The man was amused. "I'm in the habit of examining potential customers, even when my goods are spoken for." He folded his arms. "Fifteen jugs of sorghum wine. That's more than one for every person who enjoys it in the entire city of Ping'an. Plus guests."
His eyes darted from Alice's hairpin to David's flute.
"Are you headed to Ping'an for the celebration, as well?" he asked. He pushed a clump of hair out of his face. With the curtains drawn open, David realized that the man was younger than he first appeared.
"What celebration?" "Yes."
The man frowned.
They were no longer the honored guests of Cloud Mountain City - nothing they said had to be consistent. It was a good feeling.
When neither of them showed any surprise, or any reaction to begin with, at the other's answer, he chuckled.
"What are they celebrating?" David asked.
The man roared with laughter. "The Jiang heir is celebrating a successful Core Formation. What else?"
"I suppose," David said mildly. The man found this even more funny. The man considered them, then came to a conclusion about who they were.
"He seemed more polite between the two of you inside the store," he said to Alice, with a hint of conspiracy. "The Jiang family finds insult in everything and they've not had a celebration in centuries. Your sect brother will be the cause of nine generations of enmity."
The man turned to Alice. "This was probably the wrong party to take one of your sect's young geniuses to see the world." He looked at David. "Seen one of your type, seen all of you. Great for looking at scriptures. Terrible for reading the room."
David, without the slightest inclination to correct the man, gave him a smile that must have seemed quite vapid. "What would be the right party?"
The man laughed again, easily. "Too right, too right. I must admit, you're a little different from what I expected." He looked at the small ship at the end of the dock rather deliberately, then turned back to them.
"I'm Jing, merchant by trade, sailor at heart. You can travel to Ping'an with me if you'd rather not walk. Fifteen taels for the pair of you, take it or leave it. I don't bargain."
Jing looked back at the ship, where the figure on the deck was still pacing.
"If you pay me thirty, I'll kick the other guy on board off. Picked him up a hundred li downriver. He's got more opinions than my mother and somehow makes even less sense." David knew it was a joke - unless they gave him thirty taels.
It was a good pitch. While David hadn't the slightest idea how much a boat ride cost, fifteen pieces of silver wouldn't even be noticeable relative to the pile in the purse.
There was only one thing of note - David was certain that if they decided to board the ship, Jing’s feelings about the pacing passenger would be his feelings about Jing.
Alice was already counting out silver from the purse.