“Boy, it’s the first rule of debt collection- the shakedown has to have something to shake down. How could you sell a robe that expensive on credit?”
Han quickly finished the receipt, his handwriting quite tidy, and then squatted in the alley next to Ho. He pulled out a little brush and a bamboo tube full of water, and started writing out what happened on the flagstones.
He thought the beggar would laugh. Ho frowned mightily instead. “Do you have those I.O.U.’s?”
Han nodded and handed them over. Ho looked at them, then slowly shook his head. “Mind if I keep these? I won’t ask you for free. Is Drunkard Wei still hanging around Embroidery Alley?”
Han nodded.
“I know you want to learn how to swing a sword. Wei used to have a little fame among the people of the Rivers and Lakes as a swordsman. Tell him Ho asked that he teach you the basics of the basics, his Three Character True Method to settle our debt.”
Han tilted his head to the side, narrowing his eyes at the beggar. Ho flapped his hand, dexterously opening one of his three hanging pouches and stashing the receipts at the same time.
“Alright, yes, he doesn’t actually owe me a debt, but it lets us both save face. He’ll teach you. I really do have a use for these. And… if you see Dong Zhuo again, run and find Commander Wang in the guard station off Three Lion Street. He’ll want to pick up Zhuo for a cup of wine down at the station. No, I won’t say more, I’d just have to lie to you.”
Han shrugged and nodded, not caring about the receipts. He couldn’t use them, but he was very interested in swordsmanship. Now he just had to go home, and explain to mom she was out twenty silver for the robes, the five silver in excellent silk she invested in the robes, and more than a week’s labor.
He sighed, then straightened his back. If he had been strong enough, he wouldn’t have needed to pay off Little Sparrow and the Chen Clan. Then, at least, he could bring back the three hundred cash. Useless paper for swordsmanship lessons? He’d take that deal every day.
Home was back through the twisting alleys and wide thoroughfares, every scrap of the city bursting with people. Bluestone City was on the Agate River, carefully poised to intercept the mercantile traffic of their own Broadsky Kingdom, as well as the few caravans that braved the Sky Tearing Mountains and visited from the Green Dragon Kingdom. A city of trade must also be a city of canals, and any city in the Kingdom must be defended. The walls of Bluestone City were twelve feet thick and forty feet tall, never breached since the founding of the city to the present day.
Which meant that this very rich, very old, city was also very, very crowded. It helped that Han was slim and quick. It was the only way to slip through the crowds. He could try to hitch a ride on a passing canal boat, but people got irritated if you jumped on and off without permission. Very irritated. And they displayed the irritation by smacking you into the canal with an oar and ruining your robes.
Han eyed the rooftops, but decided against it. Dirty Ho’s Waterbug Steps were quite a decent light body art, but not so decent that Han would dare try to run across tile roofs. People got more than irritated if you stomped a hole through their roof, and it was an expensive enough day already.
He sighed, as he gently wove between a grocer’s bins and the people buying vegetables. It wasn’t the first time he had failed to collect a debt, and it wouldn’t be the last, but each one hurt. It was essentially a one-woman tailor shop. Han helped as best he could, but Mom was the tailor. He could sew a button on a bargeman’s hat, but cut a robe, or embroider a tunic? Impossible.
He found Drunkard Wei in his usual pose: slumped against the back of a winehouse, sleeping off whatever had been in the jar next to him. Once, Han saw him exhale over a candle, and the flame turned blue.
Han tapped drunkard Wei’s foot with his sign. You didn’t want to shake Wei’s shoulder. He often woke up swinging. Bad dreams, he always said, and old memories.
“Eh? Ah? Who? Oh, it’s the tailor's boy. Scram, kiddo, I don’t owe your mom any money, and you aren’t delivering me clothes.”
Han shook his head and started writing with his water and brush on the wall where Wei could see it. The contrast wasn’t the best, but he reckoned Wei could manage well enough.
“How your handwriting is so neat, but your meaning so gibberish, I will never know. Since when did I owe Old Ho a damned thing other than a beating?”
Han slowly rotated his head, fixing Wei with a particularly beady-eyed stare.
“He did buy me a jug of wine that one time.”
Han’s stare intensified. Wei shifted awkwardly.
“Maybe more than one jug. My memory isn’t the best. Do you blink? Can you blink? Blink once if you can blink, twice if you can’t. Fine, it might be more than seven jugs, and a few dinners, and lunches, and will you quit looking at me like that already?! I’ll teach you my swordsmanship. Much good will it do you. You can see how much good it did me.”
Wei pulled open his stained and stinking robes, and displayed a chest full of criss-crossing white scars. “All I can say is that I won more than I lost.”
Han pulled out a thoroughly worn card. “That will do.” Though, he was a bit puzzled. Ho said Wei didn’t owe him, and Wei said he owed Ho a great deal, and neither was lying, but they both couldn’t be right. Could they?
Wei staggered to his feet, looking around the alley for something. “Sold my sword years ago. We just need something sword shaped. Stick will do… here.” He grabbed a withered, mold-fuzzed burdock root from a trash heap. “A sword fit for a beggar or a drunkard.”
“We are doing the swordsmanship lessons now?” But he didn’t have a card for that, and didn’t want to write it out. Besides, it was better than rushing home to give Mom the bad news.
“My three character true art… or whatever I’m calling it these days. Three Character something or other. Three Character Fencing? Sounds good. Fancy. Look, sword fighting comes down to three things, cut, thrust and parry. That’s it. That’s all using a sword is. Cutting, thrusting, and parrying.” Wei demonstrated each move.
In Han’s amateur opinion, it looked like a drunk old man waving a rotting root around in a urine-haunted back alley, but maybe that was the root of all swordsmanship. He was here to learn, after all, not to have all the answers already.
“Now, there is a lot that goes into those three things, and a lot that comes out of it, but it’s all about those three things in the end. Like footwork. Why do you have footwork? So you can better cut, thrust and parry. So they can’t hit you. Positioning on the battlefield. Very, very important. You gotta stand where you can hit them and they can’t hit you. Very important. A shield. That lets you carry a wall around, where you can hit them but they can’t hit you. Don’t forget that bit. Tricks. Good to have tricks. Pocket sand is good, iron filings is better, iron filings refined with poison is better still, but that’s a Tang Clan trick. Not something you can buy.”
“Which Tang Clan?” Han didn’t ask, but made a note of it. This seemed important.
“Most important thing, boy, most important thing. Come here. The ground is slippery. You come here.” The ground was perfectly dry, and credit where it was due, the Bluestone Count was quite strict about keeping the city streets clean. Against his better judgement, Han approached the old vagrant. Who repaid his trust by putting a filthy hand on his shoulder and leaning in close, really giving Han the benefit of his astonishing breath.
Han felt the urgent need to boil his robes in a strong soap solution, and once they had a ten second head start, jump in the cauldron too. He’d swear he could feel the filth drilling through his robes and pricking his skin like dozens of needles.
“Most important thing is to keep this one thing in your hard. Heart. It’s a magic spell. Same spell I’ve been casting my whole life. I learned it from an immortal. I’ss true. An immortal swordsman, following the blade to his dao. He told me, told the whole squad. ‘I am a swordsman.’ That’s all you need. Just… ‘I am a swordsman.’ All the other stuff you are? That’s fine. You can be that too. But a swordsman is someone who, when you ask them who they are or what they do, they say ‘I am a swordsman.’ All you need. Keep that in your heart, and everything else comes naturally.”
The old man… and now that Han was this close to Drunkard Wei, he wasn’t quite sure how old he was. He looked decayed more than aged, like he had been rotting away faster than the years could manage on their own. However old he was, his soft eyes seemed full of sincerity. Han could feel that every word the drunkard said, he believed.
Wei patted him on the shoulder once more and started rooting around inside his robe. “Kept trying to sell this, but no one wanted to take it. Couldn’t bear to use it as toilet paper either. It’s a bit dirty, but you can still read it and see the pictures okay. Wrote it years and years ago. Manual. My very own martial art manual for my very own self created Three Character Fencing. Take it. You can study it on your own. Ask me your questions once you have mastered the basics. Now go. I have a headache from all your noise.”
Han walked out of the alley, fighting the urge to brush off his shoulder. It would just spread the contamination, and get his hand dirty too. He’d have to wash it at home.
“I am a swordsman.” The words echoed in his head, but they weren’t so easy to say in his heart. He stopped by a clean flagstone and squatted down. From inside his robe, he pulled his little bamboo tube filled with water, and his somewhat threadbare brush. He dipped the brush in the water, and in very tidy characters wrote-
“I am Han Zicheng.”
“I am the tailor’s son.”
“I am half an orphan, or not an orphan, or a complete orphan.” That one was a matter of opinion, and he changed his mind on it often.
“I am…” He almost wrote “fourteen years old,” but that was a changeable condition. It wasn’t something he could keep in his heart forever. Instead, he wrote “Training to be a scholar.” That was fine. That was something you could do your whole life. Then he crossed it out. “Training” to do something wasn’t the same as who you were. This was harder than it seemed.
“You are the last person in the Kingdom who actually believes in truth and justice.” A neighborhood auntie grinned down at him. “It’s pretty cute. I hope you can keep that heart of yours. The world of the Scholar Officials is dark, and who sees more human ugliness than a magistrate?”
Han considered that, nodded, then wrote, “You, Auntie Hua?”
She laughed. “Our Starlight Inn sees some ugliness, but us ladies sell our art and our songs. Other places are much, much worse. Ah, my. Tell me, does your mother have some time to sew some costumes?”
The costumes for Starlight Inn never needed a lot of work, or much fabric either. So long as the fabric was colorful enough, it was fine. He nodded. The costumes for the various inns and performers didn’t pay as much as proper robes, but with a twenty five silver loss, and the loss of a week of work, any reliable money was a blessing. The ladies tended to go through their costumes quickly. They were decent at mending the cheap things, but work at the inn could be hard on fabric and seams alike.
“I’ll stop by in a little bit. Tell Sis’ Bai to hold some yellow and red cloth for me. She knows what I like.”
Han nodded, then politely cupped his fist and bowed. Miss Hua was a friendly auntie, but she was also a customer. Politeness, like a tidy appearance, was absolutely required. As was telling the truth. He was stalling. Time to give Mom the bad news.
[AUTHOR NOTE- In case it wasn't clear from the previous note, this is something I am working on very occasionally. So occasionally, these two chapters are all I have written. I'm not going to be devoting much time to this story for the immediate future, but I have definately been writing Han's charicter with an eye towards his own adventures and his own stories. This week has been restful, even as a heatwave bakes the east coast. I've managed a bit of writing, not pushing myself, and I can clearly see the end of Vol. 7 and the rough shape of Vol. 8. I've even found time to try and read some proper books, though admittedly, that's been harder than I thought to manage. Still. It's been good. Regular schedule resumes next week, and as always, thank you very much. Your support is what lets me write, and writing is what I love to do. Thank you, always.
-Warby