Shuli Go Stories Vol. 7: Benefits of a Classical Education

Part 7

           

3273, 29 Chan – Southern Shu Kingdom

Lian picked up the newspaper with a mind to wiping her ass with it. Her stomach, for some reason, had been troubling her for the last few days since she'd arrived in Daming, the Southern Shu capital, looking for some work to send her further into the Empire. She put it down to bad food, but knew her stomach could handle almost anything. She had a feeling it was not ill-prepared food, but food that – Shuli Go stomach or not – would feel ill on its way out.

As she took the paper – discarded on the side of a tiny street – and wandered for a place to discretely empty her pained stomach, she glanced at the paper and recognized a pair of characters. It had been painted on every banner a few months before, and the sight of them together again almost brought her back to that warm night.

"Royal Petition"

It was a short write-up, and recent, published just a day earlier. It said that the petition had been heard only a week before. Lian wasn't surprised. It was a common tactic to ensure the full weight of the petition wasn't felt. The petitioners would be called, they would march to Nianjang, and then they'd be told to wait. The Empress was busy. The Empress was ill. The Empress had to consult her ministers. Days would stretch into weeks, then months. Eventually even the most dedicated would run out of patience or money or both, and leave the petition to wander back home, dejected. Lian had guessed about a hundred thousand people had been on the march when she'd come across it. Only a fifth of those likely had the means to continue to live in Nianjang. Fewer if the only services they had to offer were those already in abundance in the Imperial Capital: opinions and ideas.

So it was genuine surprise that flooded her when she found his name among those reported to be given an audience with the Empress. Her heart thudded in her chest and a smile came across her face as she read the passage devoted to him, two entwined senses of pride twirling about inside her as she read: one the sympathetic excitement of what she imagined he'd experienced, the other her own excitement at having, in some small way, influenced the words he'd said.

"Guo Zemin, of the Jin Kingdom, asked the Empress to address the reports of poverty amongst our brave soldiers, to lower taxes on important essentials, and re-stated the main petition call for a return to the truth of Wong Xieren and the classical thinkers. Her Royal Empress made note of Mr. Guo's well-composed arguments and rhetorical flair, and awarded him two hundred gold pieces for his service to the Empire. Several members of the court also reported that Her Royal Empress responded directly to Mr. Guo alone among the petitioners, and even deigned to ask him more than one question in response to his own."

Lian's smile remained as she dropped her pants behind a small stable and defecated alongside a pile of horse manure. None of the scents bothered her, because in her mind she was there alongside him in that throne room. Terrified, trembling, but convinced of rightness. It was easy for Lian to place herself there. It was like any other life-and-death situation – more than one petitioner had lost their head by going a word too far in front of the Celestial Throne – and she'd been in enough of those to recall the feelings, right up until the moment they disappeared and the world came into focus and everything she'd done to prepare came flooding back, soothing it all over and allowing her to do her job. And he'd done it too.

Because as much time as Shuren had spent dreaming, Zemin had spent preparing. Lian had seen it in the small differences of their personal belongings: the extra fray on the edges of Zemin's books, the shorter candles by his bedroll, the way he forgot about his bladder until it was almost too late. He was a man who knew what to do with an opportunity. Lian squat there amid the cascading smells of shit and hoped one day she'd be able to do half as well in front of a monarch.

She wiped her ass with the other bunch of papers she'd taken, but carefully folded up the notice concerning the petition. She carried it for almost a year, in a crevice in her pocket, until it slipped out one late-night summer walk in the temple in Bhuo. It fell into the main courtyard where a wind swept it around with the other detritus of the day, until it finally came to a rest in a small crevice, out of the way from any walkway or other path. And there it disintegrated over the years, worn thin by water and wind and sun, until the words flaked away and all that was left of the entire experience was a small hint of a memory in Lian's mind.

And hundreds of miles away, in Zemin's mind, a similar memory. But larger, fonder, more important. Because those months they spent in Nianjang, waiting for the Empress to grant them an audience, Zemin spent remembering the way Lian's retort had left him speechless. A woman's words, he knew, could not be the end of him, so he prepared himself to face them each night, until he was in the throne room, not daring to look at the Empress of course, but prepared for her voice, for the power of it and the assurance it would surely carry. And it did, and he was ready, and that changed his life forever.

And he never forgot who had helped prepare him for that moment. He never forgot to include her in his prayers of thanks. He never forgot her, even as he faded further away from her thoughts, Guo Zemin knew he owed a great debt to the woman Shuli Go, Zhao Lian.