Tony Pi - [BCS294 S01] - These Wondrous Sweets (html) Read online

  These Wondrous Sweets

  By Tony Pi

  I was on my way to Market Street to hawk my blown caramel creations when a messenger found me with an urgent summons from Doctor Yan. I wondered if it concerned me, the Pale Tigress, or both?

  With pack and candy-cooling rack slung onto my back, I hurried alongside my dog Worry to the Plum Season Tea-And-Wine Shop, where I told him to wait in the street. Inside, I called greetings to Master Deng, who smiled and nodded as he attended to two rowdy tables. The Plum Season seemed to be winning back its old customers, finally breaking its curse of emptiness. I had helped in that, even though at the time I had still not regained my power to inhabit caramel figurines or to conjure animals from water.

  Doctor Yan was counseling an old woman at a table in the corner. “And remember, Missus Ge, add lotus seeds to all your soups.”

  “Thank you, doctor,” Ge said. “You’re a true blessing for the poor of Chengdu.”

  “I agree wholeheartedly,” I said, and handed Ge a golden caramel horse.

  “You’re not helping, Tangren Ao.” Yan crossed her arms. “Missus Ge, you must avoid sweets.”

  Ge laughed. “Then I’ll give it to my grandson. Thank you, young man.” She bade farewell to us, rose from her table, and shuffled out.

  “Your breathing sounds much improved,” Yan observed.

  “Thanks to a regimen of healing teas,” I said, eager to reveal the gift that the shengxiao spirits Monkey and Goat had left me as thanks for my help negotiating a peace between them, here in the Plum Season: a cache of blessed tea leaves.

  But Yan whispered a warning. “Careful what you say out loud. We’re being watched.”

  I kept from showing surprise and casually glanced at the crowd, as well as the encircling gallery above. A bald laborer was drinking alone by the north railing, and he seemed to be watching us. He looked familiar, though I couldn’t place where I’d seen him before.

  I leaned my candy-cooling rack against Yan’s table. “You picked an oddly public place to meet patients, Doctor,” I said in a loud voice, but then, softly: “Who listens? The bald one up there?”

  “I’m an itinerant doctor. Like you, I ply my trade wherever I wander,” she replied.

  Doctor Yan Xue was a swordswoman who had traded in her blade for herbs. Two weeks ago, when the Ten Crows Sect had wounded the City God’s Tiger with a cursed arrow, I had needed Yan’s help to save the sacred beast. Unfortunately, I’d been struck by a black arrow as well, taking a like wound to my soul, which had left me unable to separate my mind from my body.

  By whisper Yan added: “Him I can easily ditch, but crows have been shadowing me for days from the sky. There’s one perched in the rafters now.”

  Crows? There were rumors that the Ten Crows Sect used them as spies. I feigned a crick in my neck, rolled my head in a circle, and caught sight of the crow squatting on a beam.

  It would’ve been easier to speak in private, but Yan must have had her reasons for us to meet here. We needed to blather aloud but hide a secret conversation among the murmurs.

  She put her fingers on my wrist, taking my pulse. She wore a floor-length ruqun with a chrysanthemum pattern, which might trick the eye into thinking her delicate, but her hardy hands told a history of swordplay and strength.

  I showed Yan the two sugar sculptures on my cooling rack, a rooster and a snake coiled about a calabash gourd. “I don’t think you’ve seen me make these before! Shall I tell you my techniques?”

  “Oh, these wondrous sweets! I’d love to hear all about them,” Yan said.

  And so I began describing how I made the candy rooster, sparing little detail.

  The heating of sugar in a pot.

  Scooping a dollop of it to cool and shape by hand.

  Blowing air into a pocket of the caramel to make the body.

  Yan stopped me to ask questions, such as how I kept the caramel from burning or how I pulled limbs for the animals. That was the conversation we wanted others to hear.

  In-between our questions and answers, however, we built a secret exchange in whispers.

  “Why would they follow you?” I asked.

  “Not just me,” Yan replied. “Every healer and herbalist in Chengdu.”

  A cunning plan to find the Pale Tigress. She had been badly wounded that night, and the Ten Crows Sect was counting on her needing help to heal. If they shadowed every healer, perhaps one would lead them to the Tigress.

  “How long can you delay seeing her?”

  “Not past tonight. She needs the rarest of herbs, and I must see how her wound is healing to know the exact doses.”

  “Then let me provide a distraction,” I suggested.

  She frowned. “Do you feel well enough to conjure?”

  “I think so. I’ve found a mystic tea that helps ease the effects of the wound to my soul,” I revealed. “I saved some to give to the Tigress.” I pulled a paper packet of the imperial tea leaves from my sleeve but kept it hidden under my cupped right hand.

  Yan raised her voice. “You must have impressive calluses on your hands to stand the heat of the molten sugar. Let’s see them.” She took my wrist and turned my hand. Quicker than the eye could see, the packet vanished into her keeping. “Thank you. What’s your plan?”

  “Burns strengthen a Tangren’s hands,” I said proudly, and began telling her about learning the trade under my father. “We’d also help Eighth Uncle in the kitchens make shaobing, dumplings, and more. That’s how I learned to handle heat.”

  In a quieter voice, I resumed our secret discussion. “I’ll make a decoy tiger and lead them away. They’ll need all their crows to track me.”

  “Any decoy must be convincing.”

  “Leave it to me. But I may need my friend Nong’s help.”

  “Someone we can trust?”

  “Yes. Nong’s a melon-seed seller by trade, but he also serves Magistrate Gongsun.”

  The bald one was still watching us, scratching his scalp. He had a tan line, which meant he had shaved his head recently. I imagined him with hair, and I realized where I’d seen him before.

  “That man tried to kill the magistrate at the Lantern Festival,” I told Yan. That had been a month ago, during the magistrate’s riddle contest, but I had foiled their plot, with the aid of a score of rats shaped from wine.

  “Thank you, I’ll keep my distance. When shall we meet again?”

  “The shadows at dusk will help our ploy. Give me the day to prepare. If I cannot come to you, I will send Nong in my stead.”

  We continued our idle chatter until I excused myself to go walk my dog, all under the watchful eyes of the bald one and the crow.

  With Worry trotting along, Nong and I followed Kang the horse veterinarian from a distance as he led a stallion down Jade Dragon Street. Ever since he had collected the horse at the East Gate, a crow had been shadowing him from the air.

  “Confirmed,” Nong said. “Three healers so far, with a crow upon them each. Have you noticed their eyes?”

  “What about them? You have sharper sight than me,” I said. Nong, like all of us troublemakers working for the magistrate, had his own unique talent. A spry man in his late thirties, he was blindingly fast with his hands and could flick melon-seeds and more with extraordinary aim and force.

  “Crow-eyes should be as black as night, but theirs glow as bright as the sun. Watch for that when they pass through shadow.”

  Sun-bright eyes. “The Ten Crows Sect named themselves after the Yangwu myth. Could they have made themselves sun crow servants?”

  The Yangwu were ten divine crows who
once each carried a sun in turn to light the world. But long ago, when they decided to fly together on the same day, they set the world on fire with the heat of ten suns. To save mankind, Yi the Archer shot down nine of the crows, leaving only one alive.

  “Could be. That might also explain their obsession with arrows,” Nong said. He reached into his pack and handed me something long wrapped in rags. “I showed your black arrow to the magistrate, as you asked. As yet, he can’t unriddle the bird-and-worm characters etched into it, but he’s copied them down. There’s a gentleman-scholar he knows who might have a text on ancient seal scripts.”

  Doctor Yan and I had recovered two black arrows that night. She had kept the one that had struck the tiger and I the one that wounded me.

  “Thank you. It’s a spell, of that I’m sure,” I said. “Perhaps if we knew the words, we might understand what the Sect intends.”

  “Magistrate Gongsun has a theory,” Nong said. “Since the night the Sect injured the Pale Tigress, strange happenings have become rife in Chengdu. Ghost sightings. Swarms of centipedes. And now crows with sunfire in their eyes.”

  I relayed an eerie encounter of my own. “Last night, I startled a fox on Inkstone Road. Just then, a gust of wind blew it apart, scattering it like sand.”

  “See? The Tigress had kept these creatures at bay before, but they now grow bold in her absence,” said Nong. “The magistrate suspects the Ten Crows have allied with a demon to seize power in Chengdu. If so, we’ll need the Tigress back.”

  “Then we cannot let them find her,” I said. We stopped at a food peddler’s stall where I bought three pork buns. Better full than hungry, when I took the shape of a tiger. “What of the locations we need for our plan?”

  “Well, I’m to let you leave your body at my place. As for where to lure them, there’s a small mansion that belonged to Huang the Miser. He was a brocade merchant who lived alone. His boat capsized on the Min River during the Lantern Festival and he drowned. The place has been empty since, but word of it only came to the magistrate two days ago.”

  “Good. They have to believe the Tigress has been hiding there.” I offered a bun to Nong, ate the second, and tossed the last to Worry, who wolfed it down.

  “Is there a building there with a quick escape?” I asked. “That they could believe the Tigress has been using to hide?”

  “Try the West Residence off the inner courtyard, but get out as soon as they come,” Nong replied between mouthfuls. “You don’t want to be trapped.”

  “No, I intend to lead them on a merry chase. I will need a large source of water—”

  “What about a vat of collected rainwater? There’s one in the courtyard.”

  “A full vat, I hope?” We needed so many things to go right, I worried that our plan might collapse for want of rain, or some other simple miscalculation.

  “Seven-ninths full, by my eye.” Nong spat a fragment of bone into his palm, then flicked it with his fingers at a roving fly, killing it. “I live on Crabapple Alley. This way.”

  Nong’s house was a proud shack in a laneway crammed with humble hovels. I told Worry to sit guard outside. It was single-room and tight, with the scents of soy and star anise from the melon-seeds Nong was soaking in jars.

  “Welcome.” Nong moved aside a basket of raw melon-seeds to make room. “It’s not much, but—”

  “I’m a wanderer, Nong. Every house is a mansion to me.” I unslung my pack and cooling rack, then handed the candy rooster-on-a-stick to him. “I haven’t sent my soul forth since I was hurt by that arrow. Although I’m healing with the help of the tea, for this plan to work, I need to know if it’s done more harm to my soul than we know.”

  “Let’s find out. Take the straw mat,” Nong suggested.

  He pulled the caramel rooster from its stick and motioned to me. I laid down on the mat and put my right hand on my chest, palm down. “I’ll try touch, first.” Nong set the candy on the back of my hand.

  I took a deep breath and tried pouring my soul into the caramel through my skin. A gentle warmth greeted me, and my soul eased into the rooster’s candy shell.

  Small items looked huge through the painted eyes of the rooster, such as the glazed ceramic pillow Nong had lovingly set aside. Normally the size of a melon, it now seemed as big as the magistrate’s chariot. With some effort I righted myself onto stubby sugar legs. I looked up and saw Nong’s great grin.

  “So, skin-to-sugar works. What about candy-to-candy?” he asked. He took the snake-and-gourd candy and touched the snake’s tail to my rooster’s wattle.

  I felt a path open between the two candies, and I entered the shell of the snake. The sugar rooster toppled behind me, but I slithered around the candy gourd once before settling into a comfortable serpentine coil.

  “Good so far.” Nong gently lifted the snake-and-gourd and set it into my body’s hand.

  Contact with my skin opened the way for my return to my body, which was a relief. I sat up. “Let’s see if I can send my soul out of my body into the candy.”

  Nong held up the rooster as a test.

  I stared at it and tried sending my mind into it. My soul seemed to slide as a sword might from its scabbard—but only halfway and no further, as if a strong cord tied the hilt to the sheath. Despite the tea, my soul hadn’t healed as much as I hoped. I clenched my fists in worry.

  “Remember to breathe.” Nong came nearer with the rooster. “Does this help?”

  I tried again, but the harder I pushed to escape my flesh, more pains like burns blossomed inside me. I cried out.

  “Stop,” said Nong. “We know skin-to-candy works. Let’s go with that.”

  “But if I won’t be able to abandon the decoy tiger body, our plan will fail,” I said.

  “Plans always go wrong anyhow. Work with what works, that’s what I say. There’s another way to lose your pursuers.” Nong held up the two candies. “We scatter these in the city. Reach one, ditch the decoy, and hide in a candy until I can retrieve you.”

  I wasn’t happy with that, but as he had said: work with what works.

  “Next problem. Where can I heat up caramel without burning down your home?”

  “I’ve a spot out back where I roast the seeds. We can light a fire there.”

  Soon, with Nong’s help with the flames and plenty of stirring, I made a pot of warm caramel that I could sculpt with. After taking it back inside, I pulled a glob of the golden candy and rolled it back and forth between my palms.

  “How are you going to make a life-sized Tiger?” Nong asked. “You don’t have that much caramel.”

  “It’s the look of the candy tiger that’s important,” I explained. “Once I have that, I can immerse it in water and compel a sizable measure of the water to take the same shape.”

  The real question was, how could I make a Pale Tiger decoy convincing enough to fool men and crows? My conjurations looked more like art than real.

  But the spirit of Tiger still owed me for saving the Pale Tigress. That was how the spirits of the shengxiao worked: boons for tasks I did for them, and debts for powers I borrowed. Could I trade in that favor for Tiger’s help?

  I carefully blew a caramel bubble and made sure that it was inflated enough to serve as the tiger’s body. All the while keeping the image of the Pale Tigress in mind, I pinched a wide mouth and two ears, then pulled four strong legs for it. With a quick bite, the thin sugar pipe that I blew through became its long tail.

  Nong had seen me shape my candy animals many times before, but he still seemed rapt by it.

  I stuck the candy on a stick and turned it this way and that. The shaping of a tiger was the easy part. The art of the candy tiger was in how the Tangren painted it.

  With steady brushwork, I painted the Pale Tigress in red food dye, whiskers first. One strange thing I had noticed about her that night was that her stripes matched the layout of Chengdu’s streets. I painted her coat with that in mind, capturing a section of town I knew well: from Market Street and Med
icine Lane, to White Crane Alley and Inkstone Road, bounded in the east by Fragrant Osmanthus Street and by Little Bowl Road in the west.

  Finally, I painted the character for king on the tigress’s forehead, symbolizing her power and bravery. Its eyes I dotted with my blood, drawn from a small cut on the back of my hand.

  I addressed the caramel tiger with reverence. “King Tiger, Fiercest Spirit of the Zodiac! I, plodding Ao, pray you forgive this intrusion. I have but a small request.”

  The sculpture in my hand came to life, stretching as a true tiger would when waking from slumber. Nong hopped back a step, eyes widening.

  Tiger’s voice roared in my mind. Sugar-shaper Ao! You’re owed a boon from me for saving the City God’s Tiger. Growl out what you crave.

  “The Pale Tigress still needs Doctor Yan’s help, but the Ten Crows Sect are following her,” I said. “I plan to throw them off the scent with a conjuration, but I fear my decoy will not be convincing without your help.”

  I agree. Your water-beasts show the marrow and vigor of what you craft, but they do not mirror true life.

  “Pale imitations,” I said. “How do I deceive them, Grand General?”

  First, ponder who hunts you. Do they know what the City God’s Tiger looks like? Track her by scent? Know how a tiger should prowl and pounce?

  “‘Likely’ for the first; ‘uncertain’ for the second; ‘perhaps’ for the last,” I admitted. “But I’ll be facing demon crows with unknown strengths. Best I assume yes, yes, and yes.”

  To fool their eyes, ears, and nostrils, add the Tigress’s blood to the water you wish to craft into her likeness, Tiger said. The blood will remember for you her shape, roar, and scent.

  “Her blood? But we can’t get to her—”

  Tiger ignored my question. As for the other, I will make you more tiger in instinct than man.

  “What do you mean, more tiger than man?”

  Nong raised an eyebrow. He was hearing only half the conversation, but I could imagine his unease at what he’d heard.

  I cannot teach you how to act like a tiger in the time you have. Your only hope is to call upon the tiger’s instinct.