Chapter 678 — Nobody Looks at a Porter

CHAPTER 678

Nobody Looks at a Porter

“Don’t look at him,” Old Zuo told himself, and looked at him anyway.

The Orchard had no morning. Pale gold light came from everywhere at once.

The man with the grey sleeve band walked down the rope lines with two hirelings behind him. He didn’t stop at any fire. He only looked at the packs, the baskets, and how far each porter’s knees bent under his load.

He’s choosing which parties will come out heavy, Old Zuo thought. A man like that doesn’t pick herbs. He picks the pickers.

“That’s the Cangming line,” the first hireling said. “All swords. Not worth it.”

“Everyone’s worth it at the last fold,” the grey-band man said. “Swords get tired too.”

He came on down Pan’s line. At the very end of the rope sat the porter Ah Fu, in a straw hat with ash on his face, eating a cold rice ball.

The grey-band man’s eyes started along the porters.

Ah Fu stood up, turned his back and started fighting a pack strap. He cursed it in a thick river accent and bent so far over the pack that all anyone could see was a hat and an elbow.

The grey-band man’s eyes passed over a hat and an elbow, and moved on.

“Rope man,” the second hireling said, stopping in front of him. “Any of your porters haul more than they should?”

“Haul?” Old Zuo said, spreading his hands. “Young sir, they’re porters! They haul what they’re told and complain about it. That one at the end bought my cheapest coil and argued the price down twice.”

The hireling sniffed and moved on.

Then a young man in Thunder Abyss violet came along the path the other way, carrying an old man’s pack on his back as if it weighed nothing. The camp said he was Ao Tong, the one who never wasted a word. He passed the end of Pan’s rope, and his eyes landed on the porter.

Ao Tong seemed to recognise something about him. His gaze lingered, but he didn’t call to the porter.

At the rope-seller’s mat, Ao Tong began haggling over a coil of ring-grass — loudly, naming prices the seller hadn’t asked. The hireling’s head turned at the noise and stayed turned.

Ah Fu scratched his ear under the hat and yawned hugely.

Ao Tong paid for the coil, walked back past the end of the rope and set his waterskin down on the stone beside the straw hat. “Porters get thirsty,” Ao Tong said to nobody in particular.

Ao Tong walked on.

Old Zuo sat very still. He’d watched this porter limp out of the Hanyan basin saying “I fell,” and read the herb beds and call it superstition. Now two men had looked straight at him in one morning, and both had seen nothing.

The true master never shows his face, Old Zuo thought. And I sold the story of that basin for a silk coat!

He made up his mind on the spot.

“I’ll never sell him another coil,” Old Zuo muttered. “He’s too good a customer.”

The Third Fold was a ravine of bent air between two terraces.

“One at a time!” Pan Hongzhu roared from the far lip. “Hands on the rope! Anybody who lets go, I’m not coming to get you!”

Half the company was already across with Pan. Five hands were out on the rope over the fold, Old Zuo nearest the near side. Shi Feng stood last on the near lip with a loose carry-loop round his wrist, beside the knot-post and Pan’s second holder.

The fold began to drink.

The rope sagged, then pulled. The knot-post groaned. Out in the bent air, five men suddenly weighed as much as fifty.

“It’s taking us!” the second holder shouted, his face white. “It’ll drag the whole line in!”

“Hold it!” Pan Hongzhu bellowed.

The second holder drew his knife and cut the rope at the post.

The freed end whipped off the lip. Five men dropped into the fold, and the rope went with them.

The cut end flashed past ten paces out, in the heat haze rising off the ring-grass. Mo’s Left Fold needed a shimmer, and the rope was making its own. Shi Feng put himself where the shimmer said he wasn’t.

For one step he was ten paces out over nothing.

His hand closed on the rope’s end. Then he was back on the lip, heels dug in, the rope tight between his fists and Pan’s.

He heaved, with a red face and a porter’s ugly groan. Five men came up out of the bent air one after another and crawled onto the far terrace, sobbing.

Ten paces exactly, Shi Feng thought. Not one more. Mo’s Left Fold had reached Minor Success, on a rope, in front of thirty people, and none of them had seen it.

“The porter grabbed the end!”

“…Lucky dog.”

Pan Hongzhu came back across, picked up the second holder by his collar and threw him into a bush.

“You cut my rope?” Pan Hongzhu roared. “On my line? We settle this at the gate!”

“It would have taken all of us!” the second holder cried from the bush.

“Then it takes all of us! That’s what a rope is!” Pan Hongzhu shouted. He turned and slapped the porter’s shoulder hard enough to raise ash. “Saving one life beats building a seven-storey pagoda. Good arms, Ah Fu. Don’t let it go to your head.”

“Yes, boss,” Shi Feng said humbly.

Old Zuo came over last, holding the cut end of his own rope. He looked at it for a long time.

“When the tree falls, the monkeys scatter,” Old Zuo said sourly, glancing at the bush. Then he lowered his voice. “I felt the rope go short and then long.”

“Rope stretches,” Shi Feng said.

“Not mine,” Old Zuo said.

Shi Feng hitched his pack higher and walked past him, grumbling loudly enough for the whole company to hear.

“Five lives,” Shi Feng complained, keeping his shoulders bent, “and not one person says thank you to the porter. Not even a rice ball.”

Up ahead, past the last terrace, the trees opened into a great courtyard of grass, and in the middle of it stood a single tree with a single fruit.