“Did you eat the boatman?” she asked, and the tiger opened one eye.
“No, but I could if you wanted me to. He ran off somewhere.”
“No, that’s not what I want. I want to get across the river.”
“If only you had a boat to help you.”
“Yes, if only!”
The tiger made as sympathetic a face as a tiger could make.
“It seems I have this boat, little scholar. Why don’t you ask me to get you across the river?”
Dieu took a deep breath.
“Please, Ho Thi Thao, will you take me across the river?”
“What will you give me?”
Angrily, Dieu spread her meager possessions out on the bank. It wasn’t very much, just a change of clothes and some embroidered cloth slippers, and the few books she could keep back from her family’s creditors.
The tiger came to the bank to look over her things carefully, turning her head this way and that. She nosed at the books and the clothes without interest, and finally she shook her head.
“Do you have nothing valuable there?”
“But of course I do,” said Dieu. “Look, here, this is Songs of Everlasting Sorrow, the poems that the poet Lu Bi wrote when his wife had gone ahead of him into death.”
She paused.
“I could read it to you if you like. If that would be enough payment for getting me across the river.”
“Hm. Give me a taste, and if it is good, I will allow you to read the rest. And then I will row this boat across the river with you in it.”
Dieu, a little surprised that that had worked at all, knelt on the side of the river and opened the small volume on her lap. She skipped the first quarter, because it was only the praise of the emperor at the time, and she skipped the first few pages of the second quarter, because it was only a description of the land of the dead, which was beautiful in a certain way, but far from enticing.
“And so you came to my house on the soft pads of a midwinter kitten, the whisper of your black tresses sweeping your heels, and so you came to my heart just as quietly. Why, then, did you make such a terrible noise when you let go of my hand and departed, a great trumpeting of horns, a great beating of drums? We had always kept our home in the sweetest of silence, broken only with a dropped spool of scarlet thread or a soft cry from your lips early in the morning. Now your departure crashes like a thunder, and the timbers of the house shake with the force of the space you left behind.”
They were Dieu’s favorite lines, and she was almost afraid to look up to see how the tiger took them. When you love a thing too much, it is a special kind of pain to show it to others and to see that it is lacking.
The tiger, however, was nodding her head, an expression of great concentration on her round face.
“Yes, that is good. Read me all of that, and then read it to me again, and I will take you across the river.”
“I did not say that I would read it twice,” Dieu muttered, but quietly, because she read well, and she enjoyed it. “Do you want all of it, or only the part—”
The tiger uttered a low growl, and her eyes took on a peculiar stony hardness, like jade or carnelian, nothing living at all, but very bright.
“I want all of it,” she insisted, “and I want it twice.”
“Very well,” said Dieu, and she opened her book from the beginning and as the tiger listened, she read it through twice. On the second pass, the tiger murmured the words with her, almost perfectly, and then she recited the whole of the poem from memory, perfect in tone as if she could read herself.
“All right,” she said finally. “Come sit in the boat, and I will row you across the river.”
* * *
Chih paused.
“So how was that?” they asked, and the tigers thought for a moment. At least, Sinh Loan and Sinh Cam thought. Sinh Hoa was probably asleep, though at this point, Chih would not have bet a great deal of money on it.
“Good,” Sinh Cam said. “That is how we tell it, mostly. But why did Ho Thi Thao not eat the boatman? It’s a much better idea than just driving him off.”
“Because it is not such a good story for humans if they get randomly eaten and do not deserve it,” said Sinh Loan, somewhat to Chih’s surprise. “I suppose they mostly tell this story to humans after all.”
“It’s still different from what we would say,” said Sinh Hoa, her eyes closed.
“What would you say?” asked Si-yu abruptly.
Chih glanced at her in surprise. The mammoth scout looked a little calmer at least, and she looked from Chih to the tigers and back again, as if unsure which story she should trust, if either.
Sinh Loan yawned, shrugging her thick shoulders.
“The big difference is that Ho Thi Thao eats her book after she has the story twice.”
Once, Chih sat very still in an Ue County graveyard pretending to be a junior ghost so they could hear the stories that the corpses rose to tell each other at the Rose Moon festival. If they had been caught, they would have been torn from limb to limb, but if they had heard of such a thing from the corpses, there was a good chance that they would have done exactly what they did now, which was gasp and stare.
“Why would she do such a thing?” Chih demanded, and then they covered their mouth with their hand, blushing red.
Sinh Loan smiled triumphantly as if she had caught Chih out. In a very real way, she had. Chih had spent years at Singing Hills perfecting an open face and a listening posture, and being startled to gasps and stares was something that was only meant to happen to very young clerics.
“Scholar Dieu asked the same thing,” Sinh Loan said. “Here.”
* * *
As the sun grew ripe and started to drop towards the horizon, Scholar Dieu read the poem, and as she did, it came to Ho Thi Thao how very beautiful she was. She had been beautiful in bed for three nights, which was important, and she was beautiful now, when she was angry at having her way blocked. It came to Ho Thi Thao that perhaps she wanted to learn how else the scholar was beautiful, and even in what ways the scholar might be ugly, which could also be fascinating and beloved.
She let the scholar’s voice lull her into a half-dream as the boat rocked in the river’s waves, and then, too soon, she closed the book and stood up.
“I have paid my fee, and now you should hold up your end of the bargain,” she said.
“Of course. Give me the book.”
The scholar did, and as my sister said, she gutted it with one stroke of her paw and swallowed the wounded pages in two great bites.
Then Dieu stood up, crying out in pain as if she were the one who had been clawed, and when she stamped her foot, the river itself shook in its banks, so great was her anger.
“Why did you do that?” she demanded, tears falling down her face, and Ho Thi Thao looked at her in puzzlement.
“I told you I wanted it,” she said, “and now it is mine.”
In response, Scholar Dieu scooped up a rock from the river bank and pitched it as hard as she could at poor Ho Thi Thao, flung so hard that it chipped one of her magnificent fangs.
“And so that is yours too,” Scholar Dieu said angrily. “Now fulfill your bargain and take me across the river.”
For a moment, the pain in Ho Thi Thao’s tooth made her want to strike the scholar’s head from her shoulders, but then the word came to her, the way words seldom did, beautiful, and the scholar was.