Chapter 2
Only after following Prince Chen back to his residence did I discover why that paragon of nobility had taken an interest in a country woman like me.
He said that when he heard me sing the Purple Bamboo Song outside the tavern, it carried him back three years, to an assassination attempt during his imperial tour of Pingjiang Prefecture.
His men had been killed or scattered. To lose the assassins for good, he had leapt with his last loyal guard into the Cheng River beneath a cliff.
He stayed underwater for a long time before daring to surface.
To conceal his whereabouts, he hid in a farmer’s chicken coop until night, intending to slip into the kitchen and find something to eat.
Even a bowl of pot-rinsing water would have done.
He truly was starving.
Yet when the farm family finally settled down, he heard their child bride begging her mother-in-law for mercy.
She had eaten nothing all day. She was afraid she might die in her sleep from hunger and fail to rise in the morning to dress her mother-in-law and cook breakfast. Then the poor woman would have to dirty her own hands throwing the girl’s bag of bones outside.
“Were you a starving ghost in your last life? All you ever do is whine about hunger!”
After shrieking abuse for some time, the mother-in-law finally showed great “mercy” and allowed the girl to drink the bowl of pot-rinsing water sitting by the stove.
“There are plenty of burnt rice scraps in it. Enough to fill the belly of a wretch like you.”
The girl thanked her profusely, ran into the kitchen, and gulped down the stone-cold water.
She never noticed the man crouched behind the stove, watching the bowl like a wolf.
Then he stepped on a piece of firewood. In the deep night, the crack sounded deafening.
The girl froze, clutching her bowl and staring at him with huge eyes.
Her mother-in-law assumed she had made the noise and began cursing from the bedroom.
Wounded though he was, Prince Chen was nearly ready to kill.
But when the girl spotted the blood on his chest, she opened her lips and began to sing.
Her soft Suzhou dialect wound through a lilting melody.
The words seemed to praise her mother-in-law’s virtue and generosity, comparing her to a merciful goddess. He understood little of it, only that the girl’s voice soothed him.
It soothed the old woman too. She stopped cursing and merely shouted, “Careful, little slut! Break that bowl and I will skin you alive!”
Later, the girl shared half her pot water with him, hid him in a cave on the back mountain, and came every night at the same hour with half a bowl of water and herbs she had crushed in advance.
Gradually, he learned that the melody she sang whenever work exhausted her, the dark road frightened her, or she needed to flatter her mother-in-law—always the same tune, though the words changed endlessly—was called the Purple Bamboo Song.
It was a folk melody from the Suzhou countryside.
Yes. I had been thirteen that year, and already a child bride in the Lin household for eight years.
I had a great deal of experience.
I knew how to avoid provoking my mother-in-law and when I could beg successfully for food without earning a beating.
Her curses had long since become part of daily life.
I helped him that night mostly because I desperately wanted to send the enormous trouble away before my mother-in-law noticed.
If a neighbor’s dog went missing, she would slap me for not keeping my eyes open. If a stranger entered our home, whether anyone died or anything was stolen, she would beat me half to death with a club.
Only after that did I consider that he was handsome, did not look wicked, was wounded, and seemed rather pitiful.
I sometimes rescued injured animals while gathering firewood in the hills. A life was a life. This was no different.
I never imagined that the man who vanished before his wounds had healed was Prince Chen.
No wonder he had looked familiar.
Still less had I imagined he would treasure old debts so faithfully.
At last, fortune had turned in my favor.