Facing Off

Jegal Do-won’s scheme brought a laugh out of me in spite of myself.

He means to put Namgung Mu-baek’s mind out of order before the sparring match. A brainy hellion bastard is a headache every time.

I sat at my ease in the pavilion and drank.

“Young master, do not fret yourself so. Sit and enjoy what he is doing.”

“Can a man enjoy that? There is no telling what he will do.”

“He is doing it because he is uneasy. And if the young master grows more uneasy still, he will only raise more hell.”

“Is that how it is?”

“A hellion cannot get out of being a hellion. He will play the hellion, and he will try to ruin something with it.”

Namgung Mu-baek tossed back a cup of wine as though my words had not sat well with him. He had taken it personally.

— Tring-a-ring-ring!

Jegal Do-won gathered the pipa into his arms and played. The tone came clear and bright, the sound of a man who had been properly taught his music. They did say the Jegal Clan made the study of music compulsory. His playing and the three household courtesans’ accompaniment came together exquisitely, and it made a fine performance.

“Do you know what music that is?”

Namgung Mu-baek asked me. He seemed to be enjoying it well enough.

“The piece is called High Mountains and Flowing Water, and it is reckoned the second of the Ten Great Melodies.¹ Do you know Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi?”

“Even I know that much. Is there not the old tale that when Zhong Ziqi, the one man who knew his music, died, Bo Ya cut the strings of his qin?”

“Just so. High Mountains and Flowing Water is the piece Bo Ya composed on losing Zhong Ziqi, the one who knew his music.”

Perhaps that was why the piece was mournful past all describing. Jegal Do-won, who had been listening to the two of us, broke off as though taken aback and looked at me.

“Scholar Cheon, it seems you know something of music?”

“Well, I know all of the Ten Great Melodies. I can play them, too.”

In that instant the look in his eyes turned nasty.

“Splendid. Shall the two of us each play a piece we are fond of? On a day like this, is it not good to get drunk on a little pleasure? Little Brother Mu-baek, sit there and appreciate our playing. Though, having trained in nothing but the martial arts, I wonder whether you can appreciate a performance at all.”

Namgung Mu-baek bridled at being run down as a blade-hand who knew nothing of music. True as the words were, calling him an ignorant blade-hand to his face was a step over the line. Before he could show his temper, though, Jegal Do-won had started in on the pipa again.

“Hrmph!”

Namgung Mu-baek held his temper down and glared at Jegal Do-won.

So this is how it went. Working a man’s temper up, and cleverly at that.

Jegal Do-won gave him no room to answer back.

“Little Brother Mu-baek. Can you tell what piece this is?”

He asked it as he played. I stepped in first.

“Is that not White Snow in Early Spring? A famous piece — clear, clean, quick measures depicting the birth and age and sickness and death of all things.”

“Just as I thought! Remarkable. A mere scholar, and he knows White Snow in Early Spring.”

“It is one of the Ten Great Melodies. It would be strange not to know it.”

At that Namgung Mu-baek shut his mouth tight. He was hearing the piece for the first time in his life.

“Last year he made sport of me with poetry and calligraphy, and today it is music.”

Namgung Mu-baek grumbled.

Just then people came crowding around the pavilion, Namgung Clan and Jegal Clan alike gathered together in one place.

“I called them here. How should so fine a performance have no audience?”

Working it out in advance and packing the audience beforehand was the small cunning you would expect of the Jegal Clan. The plan must have been to show himself off with music and then shame Namgung Mu-baek in the friendly sparring match, and he looked confident enough in his music for that.

And he did something bolder still.

“No! Is that beauty not the very woman!”

“Good heavens, to see that beauty in a place like this!”

Some of the Namgung Clan’s Elders cried out in astonishment. They had never imagined Jegal Do-won had laid a stage even to this extent.

“That is Cheong Yo of the Cheonsangnak Tower.”

She was the most famous performing courtesan in Hefei, counted first without argument. Her hand on the qin and the pipa had made her name not in Hefei only but throughout Anhui, and Jegal Do-won had paid a great sum to bring such a woman here.

Fame like hers brought her endless requests to play from high officials and great lords and from houses of rank and power, but she was known for playing not for men of that sort but for those who knew music and took pleasure in it. That set her high among the sights of Hefei, alongside Jong So-bin, the Saintess, who had lately been treating the city’s poor for nothing.

Jegal Do-won had two reasons for inviting her. The first was to let Namgung Mu-baek, and the Namgung Clan behind him, see that he had standing enough to summon Cheong Yo. The second was to have a good many people watch Cheong Yo hear his playing and pass judgment on it.

If that came off, he would stand complete not merely as a man of great martial standing but as the martial artist of true quality the Jegal Clan was forever insisting upon. Their martial artists had risen to become one of the murim’s pillars without any great attainment in martial learning, and the reason was that, set against the mostly ignorant run of martial artists, they were men of wide and various learning.

She came in wearing a resplendent palace dress, and behind her followed a woman in a plain purple robe with a staff in her hand.

“Welcome. Miss Cheong.”

Cheong Yo answered in a clear voice.

“Thank you for calling me to the Namgung Clan like this.”

She looked about her, met the eyes of Namgung Hak and Jeon I-an, and made her greeting.

“To be received by the head and the matron of the Namgung Clan — it is the honor of three lifetimes for this Cheong Yo.”

Being here at Jegal Do-won’s invitation, she gave a deep clasped-hands bow in place of a fuller greeting. A hollow laugh rose in Namgung Hak and Jeon I-an at what Jegal Do-won had done. It was galling enough that he should use their youngest to raise himself up; to drag Cheong Yo into the very inner rooms of the house and set out a stage there was impudence past all bearing.

Jegal Do-won spoke.

“The scholar over there and I are going to play White Snow in Early Spring. Miss Cheong, listen and give us your judgment.”

“Could this humble girl presume to judge the music of two such gentlemen?”

“If not Miss Cheong, the finest performing courtesan in Anhui, then who?”

As Cheong Yo saw it, this was a contest of music between the two men, and it was hard to put herself forward carelessly. With the head of the Namgung Clan himself in attendance, she could tell it was no place to let her tongue run loose. So she offered one alternative.

“In the hearing of music the girl here is far better than I am. In place of her sight she was given a hearing beyond any ordinary person’s. She learned music and afterwards lost her eyesight, so her judgment will be the more exact.”

It struck Jegal Do-won that this would certainly be the fairer way. However well the performing courtesan he had himself invited might speak of him, there would be talk behind it.

“That will do very well. Let the girl give the judgment in your place.”

“But this girl cannot speak falsely about music. She says exactly what she hears and feels, and I would have you know it.”

“If she hears my music and abuses it, how could I lay the blame on the listener?”

He said it out of certainty that his own music had already risen to the level of a master.

“Seeing that Jegal Do-won has brought Cheong Yo along, he means to grind our youngest flat altogether.”

Namgung Hak muttered it as he seated himself in the pavilion of the Demon-Repelling Garden.

“My lord, put your faith in our youngest and in Scholar Cheon.”

“I came because Elder Jegal asked it, but I never thought it would be in this fashion. The people of the Jegal Clan are a poorly-made lot, the whole of them.”

“Hoho. You came because you believe in our youngest, my lord. Do not fret so. Look — his bearing is much changed from what it was.”

“Can my wife read a man’s bearing as well?”

He had thrown it out half in joke, but Jeon I-an answered plausibly enough.

“His eyes hold their center now. Before, with only a few people about, he had no confidence in himself — he would look this way and that, uneasy.”

“So he does, indeed. And the air he gives off is settled as well. It is no easy thing to grow so settled in so short a time.”

“Much of the credit seems to be Scholar Cheon’s. Though even to another woman’s eye, this performing courtesan Cheong Yo is truly lovely.”

“For all that, set beside my wife she is a firefly before the sun.”

Jeon I-an smiled softly.

“My lord, I have a feeling Scholar Cheon will play better than Jegal Do-won.”

“Is there a reason for that as well?”

“A woman’s intuition.”

She had laid out his youngest son’s bearing in perfect order, and now she said intuition; Namgung Hak was left with nothing to say. But a woman’s intuition was near enough a supernatural phenomenon, and knowing that, he turned his attention to Jegal Do-won’s playing.

Jegal Do-won began to give himself over to the playing, and his talk fell away. The playing went on some quarter of an hour, and at the passage depicting the winter landscape his internal qi broke loose and came pouring out around him. In weather without a breath of wind, the skirts of his robe stirred as though wind ran about him alone. The force that flowed out of him with every stroke of the piece was running through the air.

— Tring-a-ring-ring-ring!

He finished the piece and asked Cheong Yo with a proud face.

“Well? My playing?”

He had put the question to Cheong Yo. Then he changed his words in a hurry.

“No, no. We should hear the whole of Scholar Cheon’s playing too before we hear the judgment. Scholar Cheon, let us have you play.”

Jegal Do-won was confident of his own playing, and he expected nothing of Scholar Cheon’s.

That Scholar Cheon bastard will be barely aping it at best. And does he think playing in front of an audience is easy? Let us see you disgrace yourself thoroughly before all these people.

I looked at the malice in Jegal Do-won’s eyes and spoke.

“I’ll give White Snow in Early Spring a try.”

I sat with the qin in my arms and began to pluck. I loosed the strings with the feel of the four seasons of White Snow in Early Spring running through them. Into every single string I plucked I put the energy of the Seven Stars and Seven Primes.

I knew what that spirit energy did to an instrument: the vibration carried far and lasted long, and it worked the harder on a person’s feelings. The cries of admiration I had drawn out of the musicians of the Murim Alliance’s Music Bureau owed much to it.

The first sighs came from the maidservants and the manservants waiting at the edges of it.

The piece painted the scenes and the feeling of the four seasons, but seen another way it stood as well for the joys and angers and sorrows and pleasures of a life, for its birth and age and sickness and death. Then, at the measures of spring, I poured the spirit energy out more strongly still and plucked the strings.

— Tring-a-ring-ring-ring!

Here and there eyes went wide and mouths fell open. Butterflies were flying in around the scholar. Yet every one of the onlookers had clapped a hand over his mouth without thinking, for fear some sound might escape; a stray noise of their own might get into this splendid music and spoil the performance.

People were not the only ones drunk on the music. As butterflies and bees are drunk on the scent of flowers, the lowly creatures too came gathering, drunk on the scent of sound.

Is such a thing possible? How can he do that?

This time, at least, Namgung Mu-baek could not help being astonished.

Is this the level the legends speak of, where sound works its change upon nature itself?

The butterflies that had been drifting over the flowers around the Demon-Repelling Garden kept coming in.

There was no way Jegal Do-won could fail to see it either.

That is possible?

It had never once occurred to him that a performance could move the lowly creatures. To him not a butterfly had come, nor so much as a single gnat.

And he had been the nearer of the two to the flowers, at that.

At last the butterflies settled in a heap on the scholar’s head and shoulders, and when the playing finally ended they rose all together and made a spectacle of it.

“Whoaa! Magnificent!”

A silence hung over everything, and then someone shouted. I looked toward where the sound had come from, and the man who had shouted went suddenly rigid and flushed red. I grinned.

He was a martial artist come with the Jegal Clan. The people of the Jegal Clan study music from childhood, and a skill in my playing that drew butterflies in had made him lose all sense of friend and foe and burst out in admiration.

A cry at beauty is, when all is said, like a sneeze: there is no hiding it.